RGOFMPMEADDW 




DALLAS LORE SHARP 




Class 
Book. 



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v3 K^ Z 



C(^gM]^°. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



EOOF AND MEADOW 



IRoof anb /llbeabow 



IB^ Dallas Xore Sbarp 

Butbor of "XClilb life IRear Ibome " 

Mltb iriluBtrations 
JB^ :fi3ruce Iborsfall 




XTbe Centuri^ Co. 

1904 



3 '3^ J J 



LWRARY .f CONGRESS 
Two C»pl«s Received 

MAR 30 1904 

C«i»yri»ht Sotry 

CLASS «- XXc.No, 

COPY B 






Copyright, 1903, 1904, by 
The Century Co. 

Copyright, 1902, 1903, by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. 

Copyright, 1903, by The Chapple Publishing Co. (Ltd. ). 

Copyright, 1902, 1903, by W. W. Potter Co. (Ltd.). 

Copyright, 1902, 1903, by Perey Mason Company. 

Ptcblished April, 190U. 



• ..:/;*•'.» ;•* ;*,•'».•' ; » , 



TO 

MY MOTHER 



COISTTENTS 



PAGE 



Birds from a City Roof .... 1 
The Hunting of the Woodchuck . . 19 
Three Sermons 31 



45 

77 

91 

107 

121 



The Marsh 

Calico and the Kittens 

The Sparrow Roost . 

Racoon Creek . 
The Dragon of the Swale . . . 147 
Tickle-birds and the Coccinellid^ . 161 
The Crazy Flicker ..... 177 
Some Friendly Birds . . , .187 
"The Longest Way Round" . . . 199 
"One Flew East and One Flew West" 213 

Chickaree . 231 

Bird Friendships 251 

Farm-yard Studies 261 

I wish to thank the editors of "St. Nicholas," the "National 
Magazine," the "Atlantic Monthly," and the "Youth's Com- 
panion " for allowing me to reprint here the chapters of " Roof 
and Meadow " that first appeared in their pages. 

Dallas Lore Sharp. 

[vii] 



BIEDS FROM A CITY ROOF 




KOOF A:NrD MEADOW 



BIEDS FEOM A CITY KOOF 



I LAID down my book and listened. It was 
only the choking gurgle of a broken rain- 
pipe outside : then it was the ripple and swish 
of a meadow stream. To make out the voices of 
redwings and marsh- wrens in the rasping notes 
of the city sparrows behind the shutter required 
[3] 



much more imagiuatiou. But I did it. I wanted 
to hear, and the splash of the water helped me. 

The sounds of wind and water are the same 
everywhere. Here at the heart of the city I 
can forget the tarry pebbles and painted tin 
whenever my rain-pipes are flooded. I can 
never be wholly shut away from the open coun- 
try and the trees so long as the winds draw 
hard down the alley past my window. 

But I have more than a window and a broken 
rain-pipe. Along with my five flights goes a 
piece of roof, flat, with a wooden floor, a fence, 
and a million acres of sky. I could n't possibly 
use another acre of sky, except along the east- 
ern horizon, where the top floors of some twelve- 
story buildings intercept the dawn. 

With such a roof and such a sky, when I must, 
I can, with effort, get well out of the city. I 
have never fished nor botanized here, but I have 
been a-birding many times. 

Stone walls do not a prison make, 

nor city streets a cage— if one have a roof. 

A roof is not an ideal spot for bird study. I 
would hardly, out of preference, have chosen 
[4] 



this with its soot and its battlement of gaseous 
chimney-pots, even though it is a university 
roof with the great gilded dome of a state house 
shining down upon it. One whose feet have 
always been in the soil does not take kindly to 
tar and tin. But anything open to the sky is 
open to some of the birds, for the paths of many 
of the migrants lie close along the clouds. 

Other birds than the passing migrants, how- 
ever, sometimes come within range of my look- 
out. The year around there are English spar- 
rows and pigeons 5 and all through the summer 
scarcely an evening passes when a few chimney- 
swallows are not in sight. 

With the infinite number and variety of 
chimneys hedging me in, I naturally expected 
to find the sky alive with swallows. Indeed, I 
thought that some of the twenty-six pots at the 
corners of my roof would be inhabited by the 
birds. Not so. While I can nearly always find 
a pair of swallows in the air, they are surpris- 
ingly scarce, and, so far as I know, they rarely 
build in the heart of the city. There are more 
canaries in my block than chimney-swallows in 
all my sky. 

[5] 



The swallows are not urban birds. The gas, 
the smoke, the shrieking ventilators, and the 
ceaseless sullen roar of the city are hardly to 
their liking. Perhaps the flies and gnats which 
they feed upon cannot live in the air above the 
roofs. The swallows want a sleepy old town 
with big thunderful chimneys, where there are 
wide fields and a patch of quiet water. 

Much more numerous than the swallows are 
the night-hawks. My roof, in fact, is the best 
place I have ever found to study their feeding 
habits. These that flit through my smoky dusk 
may not make city nests, though the finding of 
such nests would not surprise me. Of course a 
night-hawk's nest^ here or anywhere else, would 
surprise me ; for like her cousin, the whippoor- 
will, she never builds a nest, but stops in the 
grass, the gravel, the leaves, or on a bare rock, 
deposits her eggs without even scratching aside 
the sticks and stones that may share the bed, 
and in three days is brooding them — brooding 
the stones too. 

It is likely that some of my hawks nest on 
the buildings in the neighborhood. ISTight- 
hawks' eggs have occasionally been found 

[6] 



among the pebbles of city roofs. The high, flat 
house-tops are so quiet and remote, so far away 
from the noisy life in the narrow streets below, 
that the birds make their nests here as if in a 
world apart. The twelve- and fifteen-story 
buildings are as so many deserted mountain 
heads to them. 

None of the birds build on my roof, however. 
But from early spring they haunt the region so 
constantly that their families, if they have fam- 
ilies at all, must be somewhere in the vicinity. 
Should I see them like this about a field or 
thicket in the country it would certainly mean 
a nest. 

The sparrows themselves do not seem more at 
home here than do these night-hawks. One even- 
ing, after a sultry July day, a wild wind-storm 
burst over the city. The sun was low, glaring 
through a narrow rift between the hill -crests and 
the clouds that spread green and heavy across the 
sky. I could see the lower fringes of the clouds 
working and writhing in the wind, but not a 
sound or a breath was in the air about me. 
Around me over my roof flew the night-hawks. 
They were crying peevishly and skimming close 

[7] 



to the chimneys, not rising, as usual, to any 
height. 

Suddenly the storm broke. The rain fell as 
if something had given way overhead. The 
wind tore across the stubble of roofs and spires ; 
and through the wind, the rain, and the rolling 
clouds shot a weird, yellow-green sunlight. 

I had never seen a storm like it. Nor had 
the night-hawks. They seemed to be terrified, 
and left the sky immediately. One of them, 
alighting on the roof across the street, and 
creeping into the lee of a chimney, huddled 
there in sight of me until the wind was spent 
and a natural sunlight flooded the world of roofs 
and domes and spires. 

Then they were all awing once more, hawk- 
ing for supper. Along with the hawking they 
got in a great deal of play, doing their tumbling 
and cloud-coasting over the roofs just as they do 
above the fields. 

Mounting by easy stages of half a dozen rapid 
strokes, catching flies by the way, and crying 
peent-peent, the acrobat climbs until I look a 
mere lump on the roof ; then ceasing his whim- 
pering peent, he turns on bowed wings and falls 

[8] 



—shoots roofward with fearful speed. The 
chimneys ! Quick ! 

Quick he is. Just short of the roofs the taut 
wings flash a reverse, there is a lightning swoop, 
a startling hollow wind-sound, and the rushing 
bird is beating skyward again, hawking delib- 
erately as before, and uttering again his peevish 
nasal cry. 

This single note, the only call he has besides a 
few squeaks, is far from a song ; farther still is 
the empty-barrel-bung-hole sound made by the 
air in the rushing wings as the bird swoops in 
his fall. The night-hawk, alias '' bull-bat," does 
not sing. What a name bull-bat would be for a 
singing bird ! But a ^' voice " was never intended 
for the creature. Voice, beak, legs, head — 
everything but wings and maw was sacrificed 
for a mouth. What a mouth ! The bird can 
almost swallow himself. Such a cleft in the 
head could never mean a song ; it could never 
be utilized for anything but a fly-trap. 

We have use for fly-traps. We need some 
birds just to sit around, look pretty, and warble. 
We will pay them for it in cherries or in what- 
ever they ask. But there is also a great need 
[9] 



for birds that kill insects. And first among 
these are the night-hawks. They seem to have 
been designed for this sole purpose. Their end 
is to kill insects. They are more like machines 
than any other birds I know. The enormous 
mouth feeds an enormous stomachy and this, like 
a fire-box, makes the power that works the 
enormous wings. From a single maw have been 
taken eighteen hundred winged ants, to say 
nothing of the smaller fry that could not be 
identified and counted. 

But if he never caught an ant, never one of 
the fifth-story mosquitos that live and bite till 
Christmas, how greatly still my sky would need 
him ! His flight is song enough. His cry and 
eery thunder are the very voice of the summer 
twilight to me. And as I watch him coasting 
in the evening dusk, that twilight often falls— 
over the roofs, as it used to fall for me over the 
fields and the quiet hollow woods. 

There is always an English sparrow on my 
roof— which does not particularly commend the 
roof to bird-lovers, I know. I often wish the 
sparrow an entirely different bird, but I never 
wish him entirely away from the roof. When 
[10] 



there is no other defense for him, I fall back 
upon his being a bird. Any kind of a bird in 
the city ! Any but a parrot. 

A pair of sparrows nest regularly in an eaves- 
trough, so close to the roof that I can overhear 
their family talk. Round, loquacious, familiar 
Cock Sparrow is a family man— so entirely a 
family man as to be nothing else at all. He is 
a success, too. It does me good to see him build. 
He tore the old nest all away in the early winter, 
so as to be ready. There came a warm springish 
day in February, and he began. A blizzard 
stopped him, but with the melting of the snow 
he went to work again, completing the nest by 
the middle of March. 

He built for a big family, and he had it. IN'ot 
"it" indeed, but them; for there were three 
batches of from six to ten youngsters each dur- 
ing the course of the season. He also did a fa- 
ther's share of work with the children. I think 
he hated hatching them. He would settle upon 
the roof above the nest, and chirp in a crabbed, 
imposed-upon tone until his wife came out. As 
she flew briskly away, he would look disconso- 
lately around at the bright busy world, ruffle his 

[11] 



feathers^ scold to himself, and then crawl duti- 
fully in upon the eggs. 

I knew how he felt. It is not in a cock spar- 
row to enjoy hatching eggs. I respected him ; 
for though he grumbled, as any normal husband 
might, still he was ^^ drinking fair" with Mrs. 
Sparrow. He built and brooded and foraged 
for his family, if not as sweetly, yet as faithfully, 
as his wife. He deserved his blessed abundance 
of children. 

Is he songless, sooty, uninteresting, vulgar? 
Not if you live on a roof. He may be all of 
this, a pest even, in the country. But upon my 
roof, for weeks at a stretch, his is the only bird 
voice I hear. Throughout the spring, and far 
into the summer, I watch the domestic affairs in 
the eaves-trough. During the winter, at night- 
fall, I see little bands and flurries of birds 
scudding over and dropping behind the high 
buildings to the east. They are sparrows on the 
way to their roost in the elms of an old mid- 
city burial-ground. 

I not infrequently spy a hawk soaring calmly 
far away above the roof. Not only the small 
ones, like the sharp-shinned, but also the larger, 
[12] 



wilder species come, and wiudiug up close to 
the clouds, circle and circle there, trying appa- 
rently to see some meaning in the maze of mov- 
ing, intersecting lines of dots below yonder in 
the cracks of that smoking, rumbling blur. 

In the spring, from the trees of the Common, 
which are close, but, except for the crown of 
one noble English elm, are shut away from me, 
I hear an occasional robin and Baltimore oriole. 
Very rarely a woodpecker will go over. The 
great northern shrike is a frequent winter visitor, 
but by ill chance I have not been up when he 
has called at the roof. 

One of these fiend birds haunts a small court 
only a block away, which is inclosed in a high 
board fence, topped with nails. He likes the 
court because of these nails. They are sharp ; 
they will stick clean through the body of a spar- 
row. Sometimes the fiend has a dozen sparrows 
run through with them, leaving the impaled 
bodies to flutter in the wind and finally fall 
away. 

In sight from my roof are three tiny patches 
of the harbor ; sometimes a fourth, when the 
big red-funneled liner is gone from her slip. 
[13] 



Down to the water of the harbor in flocks from 
the north come other winter visitors, the her- 
ring and black-backed gulls. Often during the 
winter I find them in my sky. 

One day they will cross silently over the city 
in a long straggling line. Again they will fly 
low, wheeling and screaming, their wild sea- 
voices shrill with the sound of storm. If it is 
thick and gray overhead, the snow-white bodies 
of the herring-gulls toss in the wind above the 
roofs like patches of foam. I hear the sca- 
the wind, the surf, the wild, fierce tumult of the 
shore— whenever the white gulls sail screaming 
into my winter sky. 

I have never lived under a wider reach of 
sky than that above my roof. It offers a clear, 
straight, six-minute course to the swiftest wedge 
of wild geese. Spring and autumn the geese 
and ducks go over, and their passage is the 
most thrilling event in all my bird calendar. 

It is because the ducks fly high and silent 
that I see them so rarely. They are always a 
surprise. You look, and there against the dull 
sky they move, strange dark forms that set your 
blood leaping. But I never see a string of them 

[1^] 



winging over that I do not think of a huge 
thousand-legger crawling the clouds. 

My glimpses of the geese are largely chance, 
too. Several times, through the open window 
by my table, I have heard the faint, far-off 
honking, and have hurried to the roof in time to 
watch the travelers disappear. One spring day 
I was upon the roof when a large belated flock 
came over, headed north. It was the 20th of 
April, and the morning had broken very warm. 
I could see that the geese were hot and tired. 
They were barely clearing the church spires. 
On they came, their wedge wide and straggling, 
until almost over me, when something happened. 
The gander in the lead faltered and swerved, 
the wedge lines wavered, the flock rushed to- 
gether in confusion, wheeled, dropped, then 
broke apart, and honking wildly, turned back 
toward the bay. 

It was instant and complete demoralization. 
A stronger gander, I think, could have led the 
wedge unbroken over the city to some neigh- 
boring pond, where the weakest of the stragglers, 
however, must have fallen from sheer exhaustion. 

Scaling lower and lower across the roofs, the 
[15] 



flock had reached the center of the city and had 
driven suddenly into the roar and confusion of 
the streets. Weary from the heat, they were 
dismayed at the noise, their leader faltered, and, 
at a stroke, the great flying wedge went to 
pieces. 

There is nothing in the life of birds quite so 
stirring to the imagination as their migration : 
the sight of gathering swallows, the sudden ap- 
pearance of strange warblers, the call of passing 
plovers— all are suggestive of instincts, move- 
ments, and highways that are unseen, unaccount- 
able, and full of mystery. Little wonder that 
the most thrilling poem ever written to a bird 
besrins : 



^fe^ 



Whither, midst falling dew, 
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, 
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue 

Thy solitary way ? 

The question, the mystery in that ^^certain 
flight '' I never felt so vividly as from my roof. 
Here I have often heard the reed-birds and the 
water-fowl passing. Sometimes I have heard 
them going over in the dark. One night I re- 

[16] 



member particularly, the sky and the air were 
so clear and the geese so high in the blue. 

Over the fields and wide silent marshes such 
passing is strange enough. But here I stood 
above a sleeping city of men, and far above me, 
so far that I could only hear them, holding their 
northward way through the starlit sky, they 
passed — whither? and how guided? Was the 
shining dome of the State House a beacon ? Did 
they mark the light at Marblehead? 



[17] 



THE HUNTING OF THE WOODCHUCK 




THE HUNTING OF THE WOODCHUCK 

. . . the chylde may Rue that ys vn-born, it wos the 
mor pitte. 

r[ERE was murder in my heart. The wood- 
chuck knew it. He never had had a 
thought before, but he had one now. It came 
hard and heavily, yet it arrived in time ; and it 
was not a slow thought for a woodchuck, either 
—just a trifle better, indeed, than my own. 

This was the first time I had caught the wood- 
chuck away from his hole. He had left his old 
burrow in the huckleberry hillside, and dug a 
new hole under one of my young peach-trees. 
[21] 



I had made no objection to his huckleberry hole. 
He used to come down the hillside and waddle 
into the orchard in broad day, free to do and go 
as he pleased ; but not since he began to dig 
under the peach-tree. 

I discovered this new hole when it was only a 
foot deep, and promptly filled it with stones. 
The next morning the stones were out and the 
cavity two feet deeper. I filled it up again, 
driving a large squarish piece of rock into the 
mouth, tight, certainly stopping all further 
work, as I thought. 

There are w^oodchucks that you can discourage 
and there are those that you can't. Three days 
later the piece of rock and the stones were piled 
about the butt of the tree and covered with 
fresh earth, while the hole ran in out of sight, 
with the woodchuck, apparently, at the bottom 
of it. 

I had tried shutting him out, now I would try 
shutting him in. It was cruel— it would have 
been to anything but a woodchuck ; I was 
ashamed of myself for doing it, and went back 
the following day, really hoping to find the 
burrow open. 

[22] 



Never again would I worry over an impris- 
oned woodcliuck ; but then I should never again 
try to destroy a woodchuck by walling up his 
hole, any more than Br'er Fox would try to 
punish the rabbit by slinging him a second time 
into the brier-patch. 

The burrow was wide open. I had stuffed 
and rammed the rocks into it, and buried deep 
in its mouth the body of another woodchuck 
that my neighbor's dog had killed. All was 
cleared away. The deceased relative was gone— 
where and how I know not ; the stones were 
scattered on the farther side of the tree, and the 
passage neatly swept of all loose sand and 
pebbles. 

Clearly the woodchuck had come to stay. I 
meant that he should move. I could get him 
into a steel trap, for his wits are not abiding ; 
they come only on occasion. Woodchuck lives 
too much in the ground and too constantly 
•beside his own door to grow very wise. He can 
always be trapped. So can any one's enemy. 
You can always murder. But no gentleman 
strikes from behind. I hate the steel trap. I 
have set my last one. They would be bitter 
[23] 



peaches on that tree if they cost the woodchuck 
what I have seen more than one woodchuck 
suffer in the horrible jaws of such a trap. 

But is it not perfectly legitimate and gentle- 
manly to shoot such a woodchuck to save one's 
peaches'? Certainly. So I got the gun and 
waited— and waited— and waited. Did you ever 
wait with a gun until a woodchuck came out of 
his hole? I never did. A woodchuck has just 
sense enough to go into his hole— and stay in. 

There were too many woodchucks about and 
my days were too precious for me to spend any 
considerable part of my summer watching with 
a gun for this one. Besides, I have been known 
to fire and miss a woodchuck, anyway. 

So I gave up the gun. It was while thinking 
what I could do next that I came down the row 
of young peach-trees and spied the woodchuck 
out in the orchard, fifty yards away from his 
hole. He spied me at the same instant, and 
rose upon his haunches. 

At last we were face to face. The time had 

come. It would be a fight to the finish ; and a 

fair fight, too, for all that I had about me in the 

way of weapons was a pair of heavy, knee-high 

[24] 



hunting-boots, that I had put on against the 
dew of the early morning. All my thought and 
energy, all my hope, centered immediately in 
those boots. 

The woodchuck kept his thoughts in his head. 
Into his heels he put what speed he had ; and 
little as that was, it counted, pieced out with the 
head-work. 

Back in my college days I ran a two-mile race 
—the greatest race of the day, the judges said— 
and just at the tape lost two gold medals and 
the glory of a new intercollegiate record because 
I did n't use my head. Two of us out of twenty 
finished, and we finished together, the other fel- 
low twisting and falling forward, breaking the 
string with his side, while I, pace for pace with 
him— did n't think. 

For a moment the woodchuck and I stood 
motionless, he studying the situation. I was at 
the very mouth of his burrow. It was coming 
to sure death for him to attempt to get in. Yet it 
was sure death if he did not get in, for I should 
run him down. 

Had you been that woodchuck, gentle reader, 
I wonder if you would have taken account of 
[25] 



the thick-strewn stones behind you, the dense 
tangle of dewberry-vines off on jowr left, the 
heavy boots of your enemy and his unthinking- 
rage'? 

I was vastly mistaken in that woodchuck. A 
blanker, flabbier face never looked into mine. 
Only the sudden appearance of death could have 
brought the trace of intelligence across it that I 
caught as the creature dropped on all fours and 
began to wabble straight away from me over the 
area of rough, loose stones. 

With a jump and a yell I was after him, mak- 
ing five yards to his one. He tumbled along the 
best he could, and, to my great surprise, directly 
away from his hole. It was steep downhill. 
I should land upon him in half a dozen bounds 
more. 

On we went, reckless of the uneven ground, 
momentum increasing with every jump, until, 
accurately calculating his speed and the chang- 
ing distance between us, I rose with a mighty 
leap, sailed into the air and came down— just an 
inch too far ahead— on a round stone, turned my 
ankle, and went sprawling over the woodchuck 
in a heap. 

[26] 



The woodchuck spilled himself from under me, 
slid short about, and tumbled off for home by 
way of the dewberry-j)atch. 

He had made a good start before I Avas righted 
and again in motion. Now it was steep, very 
steep, uiDhill— which did not seem to matter 
much to the woodchuck, but made a great differ- 
ence to me. Then, too, I had counted on a 
simple, straightaway dash, and had not saved 
myself for this lap and climbing home-stretch. 

Still I was gaining,— more slowly this time,— 
with chances yet good of overtaking him short 
of the hole, when, in the thick of the dewberry- 
vines, I tripped, lunged forward three or four 
stumbling strides, and saw the woodchuck turn 
sharp' to the right in a bee-line for his burrow. 

I wheeled, jumped, cut after him, caught 
him on the toe of my boot, and lifting him, 
plopped him smoothly, softly into his hole. 

It was gently done. And so beautifully ! The 
whole feat had something of the poetic accuracy 
of an astronomical calculation. And the per- 
fectly lovely dive I helped him make home ! 

I sat down upon his mound of earth to get 
myself together and to enjoy it all. What a 
[27] 



woodchuck ! Perhaps lie never could do the 
trick again ; but, then, he won't need to. All 
the murder was gone from my heart. He had 
beaten the boots. He had beaten them so neatly, 
so absolutely, that simple decency compelled me 
then and there to turn over that Crawford peach- 
tree, root and stem, to the woodchuck, his heirs 
and assigns forever. 

By way of celebration he has thrown out 
nearly a cart-load of sand from somewhere be- 
neath the tree, deepening and enlarging his 
home. My Swedish neighbor, viewing the hole 
recently, exclaimed : '^Dose vuudshuck, I t'ink 
him kill dem dree ! " Perhaps so. As yet, how- 
ever, the tree grows on without a sign of hurt. 

But suppose the tree does die ? Well, there is 
no certainty of its bearing good fruit. There 
was once a peddler of trees, a pious man and a 
Quaker, who made a mistake, selling the wrong 
tree. Besides, there are other trees in the 
orchard ; and, if necessary, I can buy peaches. 

Yes, but what if other woodchucks should seek 
other roof-trees in the peach row*? They won't. 
There are no fashions, no such emulations, out- 
of-doors. Because one woodchuck moves from 
[28] 



huckleberries to a peach-tree is no sign that all 
the woodchucks on the hillside are going to for- 
sake the huckleberries with him. Only humans 
are silly enough for that. 

If the woodchucks should come, all of them, it 
would be extremely interesting— an event worth 
many peaches. 



[29] 



THREE SERMONS 




THREE SERMONS 



Thou shalt not preach. 



r[E woods were as empty as some great 
empty house 5 they were hollow and silent 
and somber. I stood looking in among the leaf- 
less trees, heavy in spirit at the quiet and gloom, 
when close by my side spoke a tiny voice. I 
started, so suddenly, so unexpectedly it broke 
into the wide December silence, so far it echoed 
through the empty forest halls. 

^^AVhat ! " I exclaimed, turning in my tracks 
3 [33] 



and addressing a small browu-leafed beech. 
^^What! little Hyla, are you still out! You! 
with a snow-storm brewing and St. Nick due 
here to-morrow night? " And then from within 
the bush, or on it, or under it, or over it, came 
an answer, Peep^ peep, peep ! small and shrill, 
dropping into the silence of the woods and stir- 
ring it as three small pebbles might drop into 
the middle of a wide sleeping pond. 

It was one of those gray, heavy days of the 
early winter— one of the vacant, spiritless days 
of portent that wait hushed and numb before a 
coming storm. Not a crow, nor a jay, nor a 
chickadee had heart enough to cheej^. But little 
Hyla, the tree-frog, was nothing 'daunted. Since 
the last week in February, throughout the 
spring and the noisy summer on till this dreary 
time, he had been cheerfully, continuously pip- 
ing. This was his last call. 

Peep, peep, peep ! he piped in February ; Peep, 
peep, peep ! in August ; Peep, peep, ijeep ! in De- 
cember. But did he % 

'^He did just that," replies the scientist, '^and 
that only." 

"Not at all," I answer. 
[34] 



^'Wliat authority have you'?" he asks. ^'You 
are not scientific. You are merely a dreaming, 
fooling hanger-on to the fields and woods 5 one 
of those who are forever hearing more than they 
hear, and seeing more than they see. We scien- 
tists hear with our ears, see with our eyes, feel 
with our fingers, and understand with our 
brains—" 

^' Just so, just so," I interrupt, "and you are a 
worthy but often a pretty stupid set. Little 
Hyla in February, August, and December cries 
Feepj ]peep, peep ! to you. But his cry to me in 
February is Spring, spring, spring ! And in De- 
cember—it depends ; for I cannot see with my 
eyes alone, nor hear with my ears, nor feel with 
my fingers only. You can, and so could Peter 
Bell. To-day I saw and heard and felt the 
world all gray and hushed and shrouded ; and 
little Hyla, speaking out of the silence and 
death, called Cheer, cheer, cheer ! " 

II 

It is not because the gate is strait and the way 

narrow that so few get into the kingdom of 

[35] 



the Out- of -Doors. The gate is wide and the way 
is broad. The difficulty is that most persons go 
in too fast. 

If I were asked what virtue, above all others, 
one must possess in order to be shown the mys- 
teries of the kingdom of earth and sky, I should 
say, there are several ; I should not know 
which to name first. There are, however, two 
virtues very essential and very hard to acquire, 
namely, the ability to keep quiet and to stand still. 

Last summer a fox in two days took fifteen of 
my chickens. I saw the rascal in broad day 
come down the hill to the chicken-yard. I 
greatly enjoy the sight of a wild fox ; but fifteen 
chickens a sight was too high a price. So I got 
the gun and chased about the woods half the 
summer for another glimpse of the sinner's red 
hide. I saw him one Sunday as we were driving 
into the wood road from church ; but never a 
week-day sight for all my chasing. 

Along in the early autumn I got home one 
CA ening shortly after sundown. I had left sev- 
eral cocks of hay spread out in the little meadow, 
and though it was already pretty damp, I took 
the fork, went down, and cocked it up. 
[36] 



Ketnrning, I climbed by the narrow, winding 
path through the pines, out into the corner of 
my pasture. It was a bright moonlight night, 
and leaning back upon the short-handled fork, 
I stopped in the shadow of the pines to look out 
over the softly lighted field. 

Off in the woods a mile away sounded the 
deep, mellow tones of two foxhounds. Day and 
night all summer long I had heard them, and 
all summer long I had hurried to this knoll 
and to that for a shot. But the fox always 
took the other knoll. 

The echoing cries of the dogs through the 
silent woods were musical. Soon they sounded 
sharp and clear — the hounds were crossing an 
open stretch leading down to the meadow be- 
hind me. As I leaned, listening, I heard near 
by a low, uneasy murmuring from a covey of 
quails sleeping in the brush beside the path, and 
before I had time to think what it meant, a fox 
trotted up the path I had just climbed, and 
halted in the edge of the shadows directly at 
my feet. 

I stood as stiff as a post. He sniffed at my 
dew- wet boots, backed away, and looked me over 
[37] 



curiously. I could have touched him with my 
fork. Then he sat down with just his silver- 
tipped brush in the silver moonlight, to study 
me in earnest. 

The loud baying of the hounds was coming 
nearer. How often I had heard it, and, in spite 
of my lost chickens, how often I had exclaimed, 
"Poor little tired fox ! " But here sat "poor 
little tired fox" with his tongue in his head, 
calmly wondering what kind of stump he had 
run up against this time. 

I could only dimly see his eyes, but his whole 
body said : "I can't make it out, for it does n't 
move. But so long as it does n't move I sha'n't 
be scared." Then he trotted to this side and to 
that for a better wind, somewhat afraid, but 
much more curious. 

His time was up, however. The dogs were 
yelping across the meadow on his warm trail. 
Giving me a last unsatisfied look, he dropped 
down the i^ath, directly toward the dogs, and 
sprang lightly off into the thicket. 

The din of their own voices must have deaf- 
ened the dogs, or they would have heard him. 
Round and round they circled, giving the fox 
[38] 



ample time for the study of another "stump" 
before they discovered that he had doubled down 
the path, and still longer time before they crossed 
the wide scentless space of his side jump and 
once more fastened upon his trail. 



Ill 



Back in my knickerbocker days I once went 
off on a Sunday-school picnic, and soon, replete 
with '^Copenhagen," I sauntered into the woods 
alone in quest of less cloying sport. I had not 
gone far when I picked up a dainty little ribbon - 
snake, and having no bag or box along, I rolled 
him up in my handkerchief, and journeyed on 
with the wiggling reptile safely caged on top of 
my head under my tight-fitting hat. 

After a time I began to feel a peculiar move- 
ment under the hat, not exactly the crawling of 
a normal snake, but more like that of a snake 
with legs. Those were the days when all my 
soul was bent on the discovery of a ncAv species— 
of anything ; when the whole of life meant a 
journey to the Academy of Natural Sciences 
with something to be named. For just an in- 
[39] 



stant flashed the hope that I had fouud an un- 
cursed snake, one of the original ones that went 
on legs. I reached for the hat, bent over, and 
pulled it off, and, lo ! not a walking snake. Just 
an ordinary snake, but with it a live wood- 
frog ! 

This, at least, was interesting, the only real 
piece of magic I have ever done. Into my hat 
had gone only a live snake, now I brought forth 
the snake and a live frog. This was a snake to 
conjure with ; so I tied him up again and finally 
got him home. 

The next Sunday the minister preached a 
temperance sermon, in which he said some 
dreadful things about snakes. The creatures do 
seem in some dark, horrible way to lurk in the 
dregs of strong drink : but the minister was not 
discriminating ; he was too fierce and sweeping, 
saying, among other things, that there was a 
universal human hatred for snakes, and that one 
of the chief purposes of the human heel was to 
bruise their scaly heads. 

I was not born of my Quaker mother to share 
this "universal human hatred for snakes " ; but 
I did get from her a wild dislike for sweeping, 
[40] 



general statements. After the sermon I ven- 
tured to tell the preacher that there was an ex- 
ception to this ^'uniA^ersal" rule ; that all snakes 
were not adders and serpents, but some were 
just innocent snakes, and that I had a collection 
of tame ones which I wished he would come out 
to see. 

He looked astonished, skeptical, then pained. 
It was during the days, I think, of my ^^proba- 
tion," and into his anxious heart had come the 
thought. Was I '^ running well " 1 But he dis- 
missed the doubt and promised to walk over in 
the morning. 

His interest amazed me. But, then, preachers 
quite commonly are different on Monday. As 
we went from cage to cage, he said he had read 
how boa-constrictors eat, and would n't I show 
him how these snakes eat ? 

We had come to the cage of the little ribbon- 
snake from the picnic grove, and had arrived 
just in time to catch him crawling away out of 
a hole that he had worked in the rusty mosquito- 
netting wire of the cover. I caught him, put 
him back, and placed a brickbat over the hole. 

I knew that this snake was hungry, because 

[^1] 



he had had nothiug to eat for nearly a week, 
aud the frog which appeared so mysteriously 
with him in my hat was the dinner that he had 
given up that day of his capture in his effort to 
escape. 

The minister looked on without a tremor. I 
took off the brick that he might see the better. 
The snake was very long and small around and 
the toad, which I had given him, was very short 
and big around, so that when it was all over 
there was a bunch in the middle of the snake 
comparable to the lump a prime watermelon 
would make in the middle of a small boy if 
swallowed whole. 

While we were still watching, the snake, 
having comfortably (for a snake) breakfasted, 
saw the hole uncovered and stuck out his head. 
AYe made no move. Slowly, cautiously, with his 
eye upon us, he glided out, up to the big bunch 
of breakfast in his middle. This stuck. Fran- 
tically he squirmed, whirled, and lashed about, 
but in vain. He could not pull through. He 
had eaten too much. 

There was just one thing for him to do if he 
would be free : give up the breakfast of toad 
[42] 



(which is much better fare according to snake 
standards than pottage according to ours), as he 
had given up the dinner of frog. Would he sell 
his birthright ! 

Perhaps a snake cannot calculate ; perhaps he 
knows no conflict of emotions. Yet something 
very like these processes seemed to go on within 
the scaly little reptile. He ceased all violent 
struggle, laid his length upon the netting, and 
seemed to think, to weigh the chances, to count 
the cost. 

Soon he softly drew back into the cage. A 
series of severe contortions followed ; the ob- 
structing bunch began to move forward, up, far- 
ther and farther, until at last, dazed, squeezed, 
and half smothered, but entirely alive and un- 
hurt, the toad appeared and once more opened 
his eyes to the blessed light. 

The snake quickly put his head through the 
hole, slipped out again, and glided away into his 
freedom. He had earned it. The toad deserved 
his liberty too, and I took him into the straw- 
berry-patch. 

The minister looked on at it all. Perhaps he 
did n't learn anything. But I did. 
[43] 



THE MARSH 




THE MARSH 

And breathe it free, and breathe it free, 
By rangy marsh, in lone sea-liberty. 



IT was a late June day whose breaking found 
me upon the edge of the great salt-marshes 
which lie behind East Point Light, as the Dela- 
ware Bay lies in front of it, and which run in a 
wide, half-land, half-bay border down the cape. 
[47] 



I followed along the black sandy road whicli 
goes to the Light until close to the old Zane's 
Place, — the last farm-house of the uplands,— when 
I turned off' into the marsh toward the river. 
The mosquitos rose from the damp grass at 
every step, swarming up around me in a cloud, 
and streaming off behind like a comet's tail, 
which hummed instead of glowed. I was the 
only male among them. It was a cloud of fe- 
males, the nymphs of the salt-marsh ; and all 
through that day the singing, stinging, smother- 
ing swarm danced about me, rested upon me, 
covered me whenever I paused, so that my 
black leggings turned instantly to a mosquito 
brown, and all my dress seemed dyed alike. 

Only I did not pause— not often, nor long. 
The sun came up blisteringly hot, yet on I 
walked, and wore my coat, my hands deep down 
in the pockets and my head in a handkerchief. 
At noon I was still walking, and kept on walk- 
ing till I reached the bay shore, when a breeze 
came up, and drove the singing, stinging fairies 
back into the grass, and saved me. 

I left the road at a point where a low bank 
started across the marsh like a long i)rotecting 
[4S] 



arm reaching out around the hay-meadows, 
dragging tliem away from the grasping river, 
and gathering them out of the vast undrained 
tract of coarse sedges, to hold them to the up- 
land. Passing along the bank until beyond the 
weeds and scrub of the higher borders, I stood 
with the sky-bound, bay-bound green beneath 
my feet. Far across, with sails gleaming white 
against the sea of sedge, was a schooner, beating 
slowly up the river. Laying my course by her, 
I began to beat slowly out into the marsh 
through the heavy sea of low, matted hay-grass. 
There is no fresh-water meadow, no inland 
plain, no prairie with this rainy, misty, early 
morning freshness so constant on the marsh 5 no 
other reach of green so green, so a-glitter with 
seas of briny dew, so regularly, unfailingly fed : 

Look how the grace of the sea doth go 
About and about through the intricate channels 
that flow 
Here and there, 

Everywhere, 
Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks 

and the low-lying lanes, 
And the marsh is meshed with a million veins ! 

[49] 



I imagine a Western wheat-field^ lialf-way to 
head, could look, in the dew of morning, some- 
what like a salt-marsh. It certainly would 
have at times the purple -distance haze, that at- 
mosphere of the sea which hangs across the 
marsh. The two might resemble each other as 
two x^ictures of the same theme, upon the same 
scale, one framed and hung, the other not. It is 
the framing, the setting of the marsh that gives 
it character, variety, tone, and its touch of 
mystery. 

For the marsh reaches back to the higher 
lands of fences, fields of corn, and ragged forest 
blurs against the hazy horizon ; it reaches down to 
the river of the reedy flats, coiled like a serpent 
through the green ; it reaches away to the sky 
where the clouds anchor, where the moon rises, 
where the stars, like far-off lighthouses, gleam 
along the edge ; and it reaches out to the bay, 
and on, beyond the white surf-line of meeting, 
on, beyond the line where the bay's blue and 
the sky's blue touch, on, far on. 

Here meet land and river, sky and sea ; here 
they mingle and make the marsh. 

A prairie rolls and billows ; the marsh lies 
[50] 



still, lies as even as a sleeping sea. Yet what 
moods ! What changes ! What constant variety 
of detail everywhere ! In The Marshes of Glynn 
there was 

A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad 

in the blade, 
Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light 

or a shade, 

but not in these Maurice River marshes. Here, 
to-day, the sun was blazing, kindling millions of 
tiny suns in the salt-wet blades ; and instead of 
waist-high grass, there lay around me acres and 
acres of the fine rich hay -grass, full-grown, but 
without a blade wider than a knitting-needle or 
taller than my knee. It covered the marsh like 
a deep, thick fur, like a wonderland carpet into 
whose elastic, velvety pile my feet sank and 
sank, never quite feeling the floor. Here and 
there were patches of higher sedges, green, but 
of differing shades, which seemed spread upon 
the grass carpet like long-napped rugs. 

Ahead of me the even green broke suddenly 
over a shoal of sand into tall, tufted grasses, into 
rose, mallow, and stunted persimmon bushes, 
[51] 



foaming, on nearer view, with spreading dog- 
bane blossoms. Off toward the bay another of 
these shoals, mole-hill high in the distance, ran 
across the marsh for half a mile, bearing a single 
broken file of trees— sentinels they seemed, some 
of them fallen, others gaunt and wind-beaten, 
watching against the sea. 

These were the lookouts and the resting-places 
for passing birds. During the day, whenever I 
turned in their direction, a crow, a hawk, or 
some smaller bird was seen upon their dead 
branches. 

Naturally the variety of bird life upon the 
marsh is limited 5 but there is by no means the 
scarcity here which is so often noted in the for- 
ests and wild prairies of corresponding extent. 
Indeed, the marsh was birdy— rich in numbers 
if not in species. Underfoot, in spots, sang the 
marsh-wrens 5 in larger patches the sharp-tailed 
sparrows ; and almost as wide-spread and constant 
as the green was the singing of the seaside spar- 
rows. Overhead the fish-hawks crossed frequently 
to their castle nest high on the top of a tall 
white oak along the land edge of the marsh -, in 
the neighborhood of the sentinel trees a pair of 
[52] 



crows were busy trying (it seemed to me) to 
find an oyster, a crab— something big enough to 
choke, for just one minute, the gobbling, gulping 
clamor of their infant brood. But the dear de- 
vouring monsters could not be choked, though 
once or twice I thought by their strangling cries 
that father crow, in sheer desperation, had 
brought them oysters with the shells on. Their 
awful gaggings died away at dusk. Besides the 
crows and fish-hawks, a harrier would now and 
then come skimming close along the grass. Higher 
up, the turkey -buzzards circled all day long ; 
and once, setting my blood leaping and the fish- 
hawks screaming, there sailed over, far away in 
the blue, a bald-headed eagle, his snowy neck 
and tail flashing in the sunlight as he careened 
among the clouds. 

In its blended greens the marsh that morning 
offered one of the most satisfying drinks of color 
my eyes ever tasted. The areas of different 
grasses were often acres iu extent, so that the 
tints, shading from the lightest pea-green of the 
thinner sedges to the blue-green of the rushes, to 
the deep emerald-green of the hay-grass, merged 
across their broad bands into perfect harmony. 
[53] 



As fresh and vital as the color was the breath 
of the marsh. There is no bank of violets steal- 
ing and giving half so sweet an odor to my nos- 
trils, outraged by a winter of city smells, as the 
salty, spray-laden breath of the marsh. It seems 
fairly to line the lungs with ozone. I know how 
grass-fed cattle feel at the smell of salt. I have 
the concentrated thirst of a whole herd when I 
catch that first whiff of the marshes after a win- 
ter, a year it may be, of unsalted inland air. 
The smell of it stampedes me. I gallop to meet 
it, and drink, drink, drink deep of it, my blood 
running redder with every draught. 



II 



I HAD waded out into the meadow perhaps 
two hundred yards, leaving a dark bruised trail 
in the grass, when I came upon a nest of the 
long-billed marsh-wren. It was a bulky house, 
and so overburdened its frail sedge supports that 
it lay almost upon the ground, with its little 
round doorway wide open to the sun and rain. 
They must have been a young couple who built 
it, and quite inexperienced. I wonder they had 
[54] 



not abandoned it ; for a crack of light into a 
wren's nest would certainly addle the eggs. 
They are such tiny, dusky, tucked-away things, 
and their cradle is so deep and dark and hidden. 
There were no fatalities, I am sure, following 
my efforts to prop the leaning structure, though 
the wrens were just as sure that it was all a 
fatality— utterly misjudging my motives. As a 
rule, I have never been able to help much in 
such extremities. Either I arrive too late, or 
else I blunder. 

I thought, for a moment, that it was the nest 
of the long-billed's cousin, the short-billed marsh- 
wren, that I had found— which would have 
been a gem indeed, with pearly eggs instead of 
chocolate ones. Though I was out for the mere 
joy of being out, I had really come with a hope 
of discovering this mousy mite of a wren, and of 
watching her ways. It was like hoping to watch 
the ways of the ^^wunk." Several times I have 
been near these little wrens ; but what chance 
has a pair of human eyes with a skulking four 
inches of brownish streaks and bars in the mid- 
dle of a marsh ! Such birds are the everlasting 
despair of the naturalist, the salt of his earth. 
[55] 



The belief that a pair of them dwelt somewhere 
in this green expanse, that I might at any step 
come upon them, made me often forget the 
mosquitos. 

When I reached the ridge of rose and mallow 
bushes, two wrens began muttering in the grass 
with different notes and tones from those of the 
long-billed. I advanced cautiously. Soon one 
flashed out and whipped back among the thick 
stems again, exposing himself just long enough 
to show me stellar is, the little short -billed wren 
I was hunting. 

I tried to stand still for a second glimpse and 
a clue to the nest 5 but the mosquitos ! Things 
have come to a bad pass with the bird-hunter, 
whose only gun is an opera-glass, when he can- 
not stand stock-still for an hour. His success 
depends upon his ability to take root. He 
needs light feet, a divining mind, and many 
other things, but most of all he needs patience. 
There are few mortals, however, with mosquito- 
proof patience— one that would stand the test 
here. Eemembering a meadow in New England 
where stellaris nested, I concluded to wait till 
chance took me thither, and passed on. 
[56] 



This ridge of higher ground proved to be a 
mosquito roost— a thousand here to one in the 
deeper, denser grass. As I hurried across I 
noted with great satisfaction that the pink-white 
blossoms of the spreading dogbane were covered 
with mosquito carcasses. It lessened my joy 
somewhat to find, upon examination, that all 
the victims were males. Either they had drunk 
poison from the flowers, or else, and more likely, 
they had been unable to free their long-haired 
antennae from the sticky honey into which they 
had dipped their innocent beaks. Several single 
flowers had trapped three, and from one blossom 
I picked out five. If we could bring the dog- 
bane to brew a cup which would be fatal to the 
females, it might be a good plant to raise in our 
gardens along with the eucalyptus and the cas- 
tor-oil plants. 

Everywhere as I went along, from every 
stake, every stout weed and topping bunch of 
grass, trilled the seaside sparrows— a weak, 
husky, monotonous song, of five or six notes, a 
little like the chippy's, more tuneful, perhaps, 
but not so strong. They are dark, dusky birds, 
of a grayish olive -green hue, with a conspicuous 
[57] 



yellow line before the eye, and yellow upon the 
shoulder. 

There seems to be a sparrow of some kind for 
every variety of land between the poles. Moun- 
tain-tops, seaside marshes, inland prairies, 
swamps, woods, pastures— everywhere, from In- 
dian Kiver to the Yukon, a sparrow nests. Yet 
one can hardly associate sparrows with marshes, 
for they seem out of place in houseless, treeless, 
half-submerged stretches. These are the haunts 
of the shyer, more secretive birds. Here the 
ducks, rails, bitterns, coots,— birds that can 
wade and swim, eat frogs and crabs,— seem natu- 
rally at home. The sparrows are perchers, grain- 
eaters, free-fliers, and singers ; and they, of all 
birds, are the friends and neighbors of man. 
This is no place for them. The effect of this 
marsh life upon the flight and song of these two 
species was very marked. Both showed unmis- 
takable vocal powers which long ago would have 
been developed under the stimulus of human 
listeners ; and during all my stay (so long have 
they crept and skulked about through the low 
marsh paths) I did not see one rise a hundred 
feet into the air, nor fly straight away for a 
[58] 



hundred yards. They would get up just above 
the grass, and flutter and droj)— a puttering, 
short-winded, apoplectic struggle, very unbe- 
coming and unworthy. 

By noon I had completed a circle and re- 
crossed the lighthouse road in the direction of 
the bay. A thin sheet of lukewarm water lay 
over all this section. The high spring tides had 
been reinforced by unusually heavy rains during 
April and May, giving a great area of pasture 
and hay land back, for that season, to the sea. 
Descending a copsy dune from the road, I sur- 
prised a brood of young killdeers feeding along 
the drift at the edge of the wet meadow. They 
ran away screaming, leaving behind a pair of 
spotted sandpipers, "till-tops," that had been 
wading with them in the shallow water. The 
sandpipers teetered on for a few steps, then rose 
at my approach, scaled nervously out over the * 
drowned grass, and, circling, alighted near where 
they had taken wing, continuing instantly with 
their hunt, and calling Tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet, 
and teetering, always teetering, as they tiptoed 
along. 

If perpetual motion is still a dream of the 
[59] 



physicist, he might get an idea by carefully ex- 
amining the way the body of till -top is balanced 
on its needle legs. If till -tops have not been 
tilting forever, and shall not go on tilting for- 
ever, it is because something is wrong with the 
mechanism of the world outside their little 
spotted bodies. Surely the easiest, least willed 
motion in all the universe is this sandpiper's 
teeter, teeter, teeter, as it hurries peering and 
prying along the shore. 

Killdeers and sandpipers are noisy birds ; and 
one would know, after half a day upon the 
marsh, even if he had never seen these birds 
before, that they could not have been bred here. 
For however 

candid and simple and nothing- withholding and 
free 

the marsh may seem to one coming suddenly 
from the wooded uplands, it will not let one 
enter far without the consciousness that silence 
and secrecy lie deeper here than in the depths 
of the forest glooms. The true birds of the 
marsh, those that feed and nest in the grass, 
have the spirit of the great marsh-mother. 
[60] 



The sandpiper is not her bird. It belongs to 
the shore, living almost exclusively along sandy, 
pebbly margins, the margins of any, of almost 
every water, from Delaware Bay to the tiny 
bubbling spring in some Minnesota pasture. 
Neither is the killdeer her bird. The upland 
claims it, plover though it be. A barren, stony 
hillside, or even a last year's corn-field left fal- 
low, is a better-loved breast to the killdeer than 
the soft brooding breast of the marsh. There 
are no grass-birds so noisy as these two. Both 
of them lay their eggs in pebble nests ; and both 
depend largely for protection upon the harmony 
of their colors with the general tone of their 
surroundings. 

I was still within sound of the bleating kill- 
deers when a rather large, greenish-gray bird 
flapped heavily but noiselessly from a muddy 
spot in the grass to the top of a stake and faced 
me. Here was a child of the marsh. Its bolt- 
upright attitude spoke the watcher in the grass ; 
then as it stretched its neck toward me, bringing 
its body parallel to the ground, how the shape 
of the skulker showed ! This bird was not built 
to fly nor to perch, but to tread the low, narrow 
[61] 



paths of the marsh juDgle, sileut, swift, arid elu- 
sive as a shadow. 

It was the clapper-rail, the '^ marsh -hen." One 
never finds such a combination of long legs, long 
toes, long neck and bill, with this long but heavy 
hen -like body, outside the meadows and marshes. 
The grass ought to have been alive with the 
birds : it was breeding- time. But I think the 
high tides must have delayed them or driven 
them elsewhere, for I did not find an egg, nor 
hear at nightfall their colony-cry, so common at 
dusk and dawn in the marshes just across on the 
coast about Townsend's Inlet. There at sunset 
in nesting-time one of the rails will begin to call 
—a loud, clapping roll ; a neighbor takes it up, 
then another and another, the circle of cries 
widening and swelling until the whole marsh is 
a- clatter. 

Heading my way with a slow, labored stroke 
came one of the fish-hawks. She was low down 
and some distance away, so that I got behind a 
post before she saw me. The marsh-hen spied 
her first, and dropped into the grass. On she 
came, her white breast and belly glistening, and 
in her talons a big glistening fish. It was a 
[62] 



magnificent catcli. ^' Bravo ! " I should have 
shouted— rather I should n't ; but here she was 
right over me, and the instinct of the boy, of the 
savage, had me before I knew, and leaping out, 
I whirled my cap and yelled to wake the marsh. 
The startled hawk jerked, keeled, lifted with a 
violent struggle, and let go her hold. Down fell 
the writhing, twisting fish at my feet. It was a 
splendid striped bass, weighing at least four 
pounds, and still live enough to flop. 

I felt mean as I picked up the useless thing 
and looked far away to the great nest with its 
hungry young. I was no better than the bald 
eagle, the lazy robber-baron, who had stolen the 
dinner of these same young hawks the day before. 

Their mother had been fishing up the river 
and had caught a tremendous eel. An eel can 
hold out to wriggle a very long time. He has 
no vitals. Even with talon-tipped claws he is 
slippery and moie than a clawful ; so the old 
hawk took a short cut home across the railroad- 
track and the corner of the woods where stands 
the eagle tree. 

She could barely clear the tree-tops, and, with 
the squirming of the eel about her legs, had 
[63] 



apparently forgotten that the eagle lived along 
this road, or else in her struggle to get the prize 
home she was risking the old dragon's being 
away. He was not away. I have no doubt that 
he had been watching her all the time from 
some high perch, and just as she reached the 
open of the railroad- track, where the booty 
would not fall among the trees, he appeared. 
His first call, mocking, threatening, commanding, 
shot the poor hawk through with terror. She 
screamed ; she tried to rise and escape ; but 
without a second's parley the great king drove 
down upon her. She dropped the fish, dived, and 
dodged the blow, and the robber, with a rushing 
swoop that was glorious in its sweep, in its speed 
and ease, caught the eel within a wing's reach of 
me and the track. 

I did not know what to do with my spoil. 
Somewhat relieved, upon looking around, to find 
that even the marsh-hen had not been an eye- 
witness to my knightly deed, I started with the 
fish and my conscience toward the distant nest, 
determined to climb into it and leave the catch 
with the helpless, dinnerless things for whom it 
was intended. 

[(U] 



I 



I am still carrying that fish. How seldom we 
are able to restore the bare exactioD, to say 
uothiiig of the fourfold ! My tree was harder 
to climb than Zacchseus's. Mine was an ancient 
white oak, with the nest set directly upon its 
dead top. I had stood within this very nest 
twelve years before ; but even with the help of 
my conscience I could not get into it now. Not 
that I had grown older or larger. Twelve years 
do not count unless they carry one past forty. 
It was the nest that had grown. Gazing up at 
it, I readily believed the old farmer in the Zane's 
house who said it would take a pair of mules to 
haul it. He thought it larger than one that 
blew down in the marsh the previous winter, 
which made three cart-loads. 

One thinks of Stirling and of the castles frown- 
ing down upon the Rhine as he comes out of the 
wide, flat marsh beneath this great nest, crown- 
ing this loftiest eminence in all the region. But 
no chateau of the Alps, no beetling crag-lodged 
castle of the Ehine, can match the fish -hawk's 
nest for sheer boldness and daring. Only the 
eagles' nests upon the fierce dizzy pinnacles in 
the Yosemite surpass the home of the fish-hawk 
[65] 



in iinawed boldness. The aery of the Yosemite 
eagle is the most sublimely defiant of things 
built b}^ birdj or beast, or man. 

A fish-hawk will make its nest upon the ground, 
or a hummock, a stump, a buoy, a chimney— 
upon anything near the water that offers an 
adequate platform ; but its choice is the dead 
top of some lofty tree where the pathway for its 
wide wings is open and the vision range is free 
for miles around. 

How dare the bird rear such a pile upon so 
slight and towering a support ! How dare she 
defy the winds, which, loosened far out on the 
bay, come driving across the cowering, unresist- 
ing marsh ! She is too bold sometimes. I have 
known more than one nest to fall in a wild May 
gale. Many a nest, built higher and wider year 
after year, while all the time its dead support 
has been rotting and weakening, gets heavy 
with the wet of winter, and some night, under 
the weight of an ice-storm, comes crashing to 
the earth. 

Yet twelve years had gone since I scaled the 
walls and stood within this nest 5 and with pa- 
tience and hardihood enough I could have done 
[66] 



it agaiu this time, no doubt. I remember one 
nest along Maurice River, perclied so high above 
the gums of the swamp as to be visible from my 
home across a mile of trees, that has stood a 
landmark for the oystermen this score of years. 

The sensations of my climb into this fish-hawk's 
nest of the marsh are vivid even now. Going 
up was comparatively easy. When I reached 
the forks holding the nest, I found I was under 
a bulk of sticks and corn-stalks which was about 
the size of an ordinary haycock or an unusually 
large wash-tub. By pulling out, pushing aside, 
and breaking off the sticks, I worked a precari- 
ous way through the four feet or more of debris 
and scrambled over the edge. There were two 
eggs. Taking them in my hands, so as not to 
crush them, I rose carefully to my feet. 

Upright in a hawk's nest ! Sixty feet in the 
air, on the top of a gaunt old white oak, high 
above the highest leaf, with the screaming 
hawks about my head, with marsh and river 
and bay lying far around ! It was a moment of 
exultation ; and the thrill of it has been trans- 
mitted through the years. My body has been 
drawn to higher places since 5 but my soul has 
[67] 



never quite touched that altitude again, for I 
was a boy then. 

Nor has it ever shot swifter, deeper into the 
abyss of mortal terror than followed with my 
turning to descend. I looked down into empty 
air. Feet foremost I backed over the rim, clutch- 
ing the loose sticks and feeling for a foothold. 
They snapped with the least pressure ; slipped 
and fell if I pushed them, or stuck out into my 
clothing. Suddenly the sticks in my hands 
pulled out, my feet broke through under me, 
and for an instant I hung at the side of the nest 
in the air, impaled on a stub that caught my 
blouse as I slipped. 

There is a. special Providence busy with the 
boy. 

This huge nest of the fish -hawks was more than 
a nest 5 it was a castle in very truth, in the shel- 
tering crevices of whose uneven walls a small 
community of purple grackles lived. Wedged 
in among the protruding sticks was nest above 
nest, plastering the great pile over, making it 
almost grassy with their loose flying ends. I 
remember that I counted more than twenty of 
these crow-blacks' nests the time I climbed the 
[68] 



tree, and that I destroyed several m breaking 
my way up the face of the structure. 

Do the blackbirds nest here for the protec- 
tion afforded by the presence of the hawks ? Do 
they come for the crumbs which fall from these 
great people's table? Or is it the excellent op- 
portunity for social life offered by this conve- 
nient apartment-house that attracts ? 

The purple grackles are a garrulous, gossipy 
set, as every one knows. They are abxC-bodied, 
not particularly fond of fish, and inclined to 
seek the neighborhood of man, rather than to 
come out here away from him. They make very 
good American rooks. So I. am led to think it 
is their love of ^^neighboring " that brings them 
about the hawk's nest. If this surmise is correct, 
then the presence of two families of English 
sparrows among them might account for there 
being only eight nests now, where a decade ago 
there were twenty. 

I was amused— no longer amazed— at finding 
the sparrows here. The seed of these birds shall 
possess the earth. Is there even now a spot into 
which the bumptious, mannerless, ubiquitous 
little pleb has not pushed himself! If you look 

[69] 



for him in the rain-pipes of the Fifth Avenue 
mansions, he is there j if you search for him in 
the middle of the wide, silent salt-marsh, he is 
there ; if you take— but it is vain to take the 
wings of the morning, or of anything else, in the 
hope of flying to a spot where the stumpy little 
wings of the English sparrow have not already 
carried him. 

There is something really admirable in the 
unqualified sense of ownership, the absolute want 
of diffidence, the abiding self-possession and cool- 
ness of these birds. One cannot measure it in 
the city streets, where everybody jostles and 
stares. It can be appreciated only in the marsh : 
here in the silence, the secrecy, the withdraw- 
ing, where even the formidable-looking fiddler- 
crabs shy and sidle into their holes as you pass ; 
here, where the sparrows may perch upon the 
rim of a great hawk's nest, twist their necks, 
ogle you out of countenance, and demand what 
business brought you to the marsh. 

I hunted round for a stone when one of them 

buttonholed me. He was n't insolent, but he 

was impertinent. The two hawks and the 

blackbirds flew off as I came up ; but the sparrows 

[70] 



stayed. They were the only ones in possession 
as I moved away ; and they will be the only 
ones in possession when I return. If that is 
next summer, then I shall find a colony of twenty 
sparrow families around the hawk's nest. The 
purple grackles will be gone. And the fish- 
hawks'^ Only the question of another year or 
so when they, too, shall be dispossessed and 
gone. But where will they go to escape the 
sparrows ? 

Ill 

From a mile away I turned to look back at 
the ^^cripple" where towered the tall white oak 
of the hawks. Both birds were wheeling about 
the castle nest, their noble flight full of the free- 
dom of the marsh, their piercing cries voicing 
its wildness. And how free, how wild, how un- 
touched by human hands the wide plain seemed ! 
Sea-like it lay about me, circled southward from 
east to west with the rim of the sky. 

I moved on toward the bay. The sun had 

dropped to the edge of the marsh, its level-lined 

shafts splintering into golden fire against the 

curtained windows of the lighthouse. It would 

[71] 



soon be sunset. For some time there had been 
a quiet gurgling and lisping down in the grass, 
but it had meant nothing, until, of a sudden, I 
heard the rush of a wave along the beach : the 
tide was coming in. And with it came a breeze, 
a moving, briny, bay-cooled breeze that stirred 
the grass with a whisper of night. 

Once more I had worked round to the road. 
It ran on ahead of me, up a bushy dune, and 
forked, one branch leading off to the lighthouse, 
the other straight out to the beach, out against 
the white of the breaking waves. 

The evening purple was deepening on the 
bay when I mounted the dune. Bands of pink 
and crimson clouded the west, a thin cold wash 
of blue veiled the east ; and overhead, bayward, 
landward, everywhere, the misting and the 
shadowing of the twilight. 

Between me and the white wave-bars at the 
end of the road gleamed a patch of silvery 
water— the returning tide. As I watched, a sil- 
very streamlet broke away and came running 
down the wheel track. Another streamlet, lag- 
ging a little, ran shining down the other track, 
stopped, rose, and creeping slowly to the middle 
[72] 



of the road, spread iuto a second gleaming patch. 
They grew, met— and the road for a hundred 
feet was covered with the bay. 

As the crimson paled into smoky pearl, the 
blue changed green and gold, and big at the 
edge of the marsh showed the rim of the moon. 

Weird hour ! Sunset, moonrise, flood-tide, 
and twilight together weaving the spell of the 
night over the wide waking marsh. Mysterious, 
sinister almost, seemed the swift, stealthy creep- 
ing of the tide. It was surrounding and crawl- 
ing in upon me. Already it stood ankle-deep in 
the road, and was reaching toward my knees, a 
warm thing, quick and moving. It slipped 
among the grasses and into the holes of the crabs 
with a smothered bubbling ; it disturbed the 
seaside sparrows sleeping down in the sedge and 
kept them springing up to find new beds. How 
high would it rise*? Behind me on the road it 
had crawled to the foot of the dune. Would it 
let me through to the mainland if I waited for 
the flood? 

It would be high tide at nine o'clock. Find- 
ing a mound of sand on the shore that the water 
could hardly cover, I sat down to watch the tide- 
[73]' 



miracle ; for here, surely, I should see the won- 
der worked, so wide was the open, so full, so 
frank the moon. 

In the yellow light I could make out the line 
of sentinel trees across the marsh, and off on the 
bay a ship, looming dim in the distance, coming 
on with wind and tide. There were no sounds 
except the long regular wash of the waves, the 
stir of the breeze in the chafing sedges, and the 
creepy stepping of the water weaving every- 
where through the hidden paths of the grass. 
Presently a night-hawk began to flit about me, 
then another and another, skimming just above 
the marsh as silent as the shadows. What was 
thaf? Something moved across the moon. In 
a moment, bat-like and huge against the great 
yellow disk, appeared a marsh- owl. He was 
coming to look at me. What was I that dared 
remain abroad in the marsh after the rising of 
the moon? that dared invade this eery realm, 
this night-spread, tide-crept, half-sealand where 
he was king ? How like a goblin he seemed ! I 
thought of Grendel, and listened for the splash 
of the fen-monster's steps along the edge of the 
bay. But only the owl came, Down, down, 
[74] 



down lie bobbed, till I could almost feel the 
fanning of his wings. How silent ! His long 
legs hung limj), his body dangled between those 
soft wide wings within reach of my face. Yet 
I heard no sound. Mysterious creature ! I was 
glad when he ceased his ghostly dance about me 
and made off. 

It was nine o'clock. The waves had ceased to 
wash against the sand, for the beach was gone ; 
the breeze had died away ; the stir of the water 
in the grass was still. Only a ripple broke now 
and then against my little island. The bay and 
the marsh were one. 

How still the plains of the waters be ! 
The tide is in his ecstasy. 
The tide is at his highest height : 
And it is night. 



[75] 



CALICO AND THE KITTENS 




CALICO AND THE KITTENS 

ONE spring day I found myself the sole help 
of two blindj naked infants— as near a real 
predicament as a man could well get. What 
did it matter that they had long tails and were 
squirrels'? They were infants just the same; 
and any kind of an infant on the hands of any 
mere man is a real tragedy. 

As I looked at the two callow things in the 
grass^ a dismay and weak helplessness quite 
overcame me. The way they squirmed and 
shivered and squeaked worked upon me down 
even to my knees. I felt sick and foolish. 
[79] 



Both of their parents were dead. Their loose 
leaf-nest overhead had been riddled with shot. 
I had climbed up and found them ; I had 
brought them down 5 I must— feed them ! The 
other AYay of escape were heathen. 

But how could I feed them ? Nipples, quills, 
spoons— none of them would fit these mites of 
mouths. What a miserable mother I was ! How 
poorly equipped for foundlings ! They were 
dying for lack of food ; and as they pawed about 
and whimpered in my hands I devoutly wished 
the shot had put them all out of misery together. 
I was tempted to turn heathen and despatch 
them. 

Unhappy but resolute, I started homeward, 
determined to rear those squirrels, if it could be 
done. On my way I remembered— and it came 
to me with a shock— that one of my neighbor's 
cats had a new batch of kittens. They were 
only a few days old. Might not Calico, their 
mother, be induced to adopt the squirrels? 

Nothing could be more absurd. The kittens 

were three times larger than the squirrels. 

Even had they been the same size, did I think 

the old three-colored cat could be fooled ? that 

[80] 



she might not know a kitten of hers from some 
other mother's— squirrel "? I was desperate in- 
deed. Calico was a hunter. She had eaten 
more gray squirrels, perhaps, than I had ever 
seen. She would think I had been foraging for 
her— the mother of seven green kittens !— and 
would take my charges as titbits. Still I was 
determined to try. 

My neighbor's kittens were enough and to 
spare. One of Calico's last year's lot still waited 
a good home ; and here were seven more to be 
cared for. Might not two of these be spirited 
away, far away j the two squirrels substituted, 
and the old cat be none the wiser ? 

I went home by way of my neighbor's, and 
found Calico in the basement curled up asleep 
with her babies. She roused and purred ques- 
tioningly as we bent over the basket, and 
watched with concern, but with no anxiety, as 
two of her seven were lifted out and put inside 
a hat upon a table. She was perfectly used to 
having her kittens handled. True, strange 
things had happened to them. But that was 
long ago ; and there had been so very many 
kittens that no one mother could remember 
[81] 



about them all. She trusted us— with an ear 
pricked and eyes watchful. But they were safe, 
and in a prideful^ self-conscious, young-mother 
way she began to wash the five. 

Some one stood between her and the hat when 
the kittens were lifted out and the squirrels 
were put in their place. Calico did not see. 
For a time she thought no more about them ; 
she was busy washing and showing the others. 
By and by it began to look as though she had 
forgotten that there were more than five. She 
could not count. But most mothers can number 
their children, even if they cannot count, and 
soon Calico began to fidget, looking up at the hat 
which the hungry, motherless squirrels kept 
rocking. Then she leaped out upon the floor, 
purring, and bounded upon the table, going 
straight to the young squirrels. 

There certainly was an expression of surprise 
and mystification on her face as she saw the 
change that had come over those kittens. They 
had shrunk and faded from two or three bright 
colors to a single pale pink. She looked again 
and sniffed them. Their odor had changed, too. 
She turned to the watchers about the table, but 
[82] 



they said nothing. She hardly knew what to 
think. She was half inclined to leave them and 
go back to the basket, when one of the squirrels 
whimpered— a genuine, universal baby whimper. 
That settled it. She was a mother, and what- 
ever else these things in the hat might be, they 
were babies. That was enough, especially as 
she needed just this much baby here in the hat 
to make good what was lacking in the basket. 

With a soft, caressing purr she stepped gently 
into the hat, took one of the squirrels by the 
neck, brought it to the edge of the table, and 
laid it down for a firmer hold ; then sprang 
lightly to the floor. Over to the basket she 
walked and dropped it tenderly among her 
other babies. Then, having brought the remain- 
ing one and deposited that with the same 
mother-care, she got into the basket herself and 
curled down contentedly— her heart all whole. 

And this is how strange a thing mother-love 
is ! The performance was scarcely believable. 
Could she be so love-blind as not to see what 
they were and not eat them? But when she 
began to lick the little interlopers and cuddle 
them down to their dinner as if they were her 
[83] 



owu genuine kittens, there could be no more 
doubt or fear. 

The squirrels do not know to this day that 
Calico is not their real mother. From the first 
they took her mother's milk and mother's love 
as rightfully and thanklessly as the kittens, 
growing, not like the kittens at all, but into the 
most normal of squirrels, round and fat and 
splendid-tailed. 

Calico clearly recognized some difference be- 
tween the two kinds of kittens, but tvhat differ- 
ence always puzzled her. She would clean up a 
kitten and comb it slick, then turn to one of the 
squirrels and wash it, but rarely, if ever, com- 
pleting the work because of some disconcerting 
un-catlike antic. As the squirrels grew older 
they also grew friskier, and soon took the washing 
as the signal for a frolic. As well try to wash a 
bubble. They were bundles of live springs, 
twisting out of her paws, dancing over her back, 
leaping, kicking, tumbling as she had never seen 
a kitten do in all her richly kittened experience. 

I don't know why, but Calico was certainly 
fonder of these two freaks than of her own 
normal children. Long after the latter were 
[84] 



weaned she nursed and mothered the squirrels. 
I have frequently seen them let into the kitchen 
when the old cat was there, and the moment 
they got through the door they would rush 
toward her, dropping chestnuts or cookies by 
the way. She in turn would hurry to meet them 
with a little purr of greeting full of joy and 
affection. They were shamefully big for such 
doings. The kittens had quit it long ago. Calico 
herself, after a while, came to feel the impro- 
priety of mothering these strapping young ones, 
and in a weak, indulgent way tried to stop it. 
But the squirrels were persistent and would not 
go about their business at all with an ordinary cuff. 
She would put them off, run away from them, slap 
them, and make believe to bite ; but not until 
she did bite, and sharply too, would they be off. 
All this seemed very strange and unnatural ; 
yet a stranger thing happened one day, when 
Calico brought in to her family a full-grown 
gray squirrel which she had caught in the woods. 
She laid it down on the floor and called the 
kittens and squirrels to gather around. They 
came, and as the squirrels sniffed at the dead one 
on the floor there was hardly a mark of differ- 
[85] 



ence in their appearance. It might have been 
one of Calico's own nursing that lay there dead, 
so far as any one save Calico could see. And 
with her the difference, I think, was more of 
smell than of sight. But she knew her own ; and 
though she often found her two out among the 
trees of the yard, she never was mistaken, nor 
for an instant made as if to hurt them. 

Yet they could not have been more entirely 
squirrel had their own squirrel mother nurtured 
them. Calico's milk and love went all to cat in 
her own kittens, and all to squirrel in these that 
she adopted. No single hair of theirs turned 
from its squirrel -gray to any one of Calico's 
three colors ; no single squirrel trait became the 
least bit catlike. 

Indeed, as soon as the squirrels could run 
about they forsook the clumsy-footed kittens 
under the stove and scami)ered up back of the 
hot- water tank, where they built a nest. When- 
ever Calico entered the kitchen jiurring, out 
would pop their heads, and down they would 
come, understanding the mother language as 
well as the kittens, and usually beating the kit- 
tens to the mother's side. 
[86] 



So far from teaching them to climb and bnikl 
nests behind water-tanks, their foster-mother 
never got over her astonishment at it. All they 
needed from her, all they needed and would 
have received from their own squirrel mother, 
was nourishment and protection until their teeth 
and legs grew strong. Wits were born with 
them ; experience was sure to come to them ; 
and with wits and experience there is nothing 
known among squirrels of their kind that these 
two would not learn for themselves. 

And there was not much known to squirrels 
that these two did not know, apparently without 
even learning. As they grew in size they in- 
creased exceedingly in naughtiness, and were 
banished shortly from the kitchen to an ell or 
back woodshed. They celebrated this distinction 
by dropping some hickory-nuts into a rubber 
boot hanging on the wall, and then gnawing a 
hole through the toe of the boot in order to 
extract the hidden nuts. Was it mischief that 
led them to gnaw through rather than go down 
the top ? Or did something get stuffed into the 
top of the boot after the nuts were dropped in ? 
And did the squirrels remember that the nuts 
[87] 



were in there, or did they smell them through 
the rubber ? 

One woodshed is big enough only for two 
squirrels. The family moved everything out 
but the wood, and the squirrels took possession 
for the winter. Their first nest had been built 
behind the hot-water tank. They knew hotv to 
build without any teaching. But knowing how 
is not all there is to know about building ; 
knowing tvhere is very important, and this they 
had to learn. 

Immediately on coming to the woodshed the 
squirrels began their winter nest, a big, bulky, 
newspaper affair, which they placed up in the 
northwest corner of the shed directly under the 
shingles. Here they slept till late in the fall. 
This was the shaded side and the most exposed 
corner of the whole house ; but all went well 
until one night when the weather suddenly 
turned very cold. A strong wind blew from the 
northwest hard upon the squirrels' nest. 

The next day there was great activity in the 

woodshed— a scampering of lively feet, that 

began early in the morning and continued far 

toward noon. The squirrels were moving. They 

[88] 



gathered up their newspaper nest and carried it 
—diagonally— across the shed from the shaded 
northwest to the sunny southeast corner, where 
they rebuilt and slept snug throughout the 
winter. 

Calico did not teach them this ; neither would 
their own squirrel mother have taught them. 
They knew how, to begin with. They knew 
ivhere after one night of experience, which in 
this case had to be a night of shivers. 



[89] 



THE SPAKKOW ROOST 



^nik- 




THE SPARKOW ROOST 



AN early December twilight was settling 
XjL over Boston, a thick foggy murk that 
soaked down full of smoke and smell and chill. 
The streets were oozy with a wet snow which had 
fallen through the afternoon and had been trod- 
den into mud ; and draughty with an east wind, 
that would have passed unnoticed across the 
open fields, but which drew up these narrow 
flues and sent a shiver down one's back in spite 
[93] 



of coats. It was half-past five. The stores were 
closing, their clerks everywhere eddying into 
the noisy streams of wheels and hoofs still pour- 
ing up and down. The traffic tide had turned, 
but had not yet ebbed away. 

And this was evening ! the coming night ! I 
moved along with the crowd, homesick for the 
wideness and quiet of the country, for the sough- 
ing of the pines, the distant bang of a barn door, 
the night cry of guineas from some neighboring 
farm, when, in the hurry and din, I caught the 
cry of bird voices, and looking up, found that I 
had stumbled upon a bird roost— at the very 
heart of the city ! I was in front of King's 
Chapel Burial Ground, whose half-dozen leafless 
trees were alive with noisy sparrows. 

The crowd swept on. I halted behind a waste- 
barrel by the iron fence and forgot the soughing 
pines and clacking guineas. 

Bird roosts of this size are no common find. 
I remember a huge fireplace chimney that stood 
near my home, into which a cloud of swallows 
used to swarm for a few nights preceding the 
fall migration ; I lived some years close to the 
pines at the head of Cubby Hollow, where great 
[9-t] 



flocks of crows slept nightly througliout the win- 
ter ; but thesCj besides now and again a tempo- 
rary resting-place, a mere caravansary along the 
route of the migrants, were all I had happened 
upon. Here was another, bordering a city 
street, overhanging the street, with a blazing 
electric light to get into bed by ! 

Protected by the barrel from the jostle on the 
sidewalk, I waited by the ancient graveyard 
until the electric lights grew bright, until every 
fussing sparrow was quiet, until I could see only 
little gray balls and blurs in the trees through 
the misty drizzle that came down with the night. 
Then I turned toward my own snug roost, five 
flights up, next the roof, and just a block away, 
as the sparrows fly, from this roost of theirs. I 
was glad to have them so near me. 

The windows of my roost look out over roofs 
of slate, painted tin, and tarry pebbles, into 
a chimney-fenced plot of sky. Occasionally, 
during the winter, a herring-gull from the har- 
bor swims into this bit of smoky blue ; frequently 
a pigeon, sometimes a flock, sails past 5 and in 
the summer dusk, after the swallows quit it, a 
city-haunting night-hawk climbs out of the for- 
[95] 



est of cliimney-potS; up, up above the smoke for 
Ms booming roofward swoop. But winter and 
summer, save along through June, the sparrows, 
as evening falls, cut across the sky field on their 
way to the roost in the old burial-ground. 
There go two, there twoscore in a whirling, 
scudding flurry, like a swift-blown bunch of au- 
tumn leaves. For more than an hour they keep 
passing— till the dusk turns to darkness, till all 
are tucked away in bed. 

One would scarcely recognize the birds as 
they sweep past in these flurries, their flight is 
so unlike their usual clumsy scuttle as they get 
out of one's way along the street. They are 
lumpish and short-winged on the street ; they 
labor and lumber off with a sidewise twist to 
their bodies that reminds one of a rheumatic old 
dog upon the trot. AYhat suggestion of grace 
or swiftness about them upon the ground ? But 
watch them in their eveniug flight. It is a 
revelation. They rise above the houses and shoot 
across my sky like a charge of canister. I can 
almost hear them whizz. Down by the cemetery 
I have seen them dash into view high up in the 
slit of sky, dive for the trees, dart zigzag like 
[96] 



a madly pluugiug kite, and hurl themselves, as 
soft as breaths, among the branches. 

This is going to bed with a vengeance. I 
never saw any other birds get to roost with such 
velocity. It is characteristic, however 5 the 
sparrow never does anything by halves. The 
hurry is not caused by any mite of anxiety or 
fear, rather from pure excess of spirit ,• for after 
rearing three broods during the summer, he has 
such a superabundance of vim that a winter of 
foraging and fighting is welcome exercise. The 
strenuous life is his kind of life. When the 
day's hunt is OA^er and he turns back to his bed, 
why not race it out with his neighbors ? And 
so they come— chasing, dodging, tagging neck 
and neck, all spurting to finish first at the roost. 

We may not love him ; but he has constitution 
and snap. And these things do count. 

One April morning, the 6th, I went down to 
the roost at three o'clock. The sparrows were 
sleeping soundly. It was yet night. Had the 
dawn been reaching up above the dark walls 
that shut the east away from the high tree -tops, 
the garish street light would have kept it dim. 
The trees were silent and stirless, as quiet as the 
[97] 



graves beneath them— more quiet^ in fact; for 
there issued from a grated hole among the tombs 
the sound of an anvil, deep down and muffled, 
but unmistakably ringing, as if Governor Win- 
throp were forging chains in his vault. Then 
came a rush, a deadened roar, and an emanation 
of dank gaseous breath, such as the dead alone 
breathe. 

It was only the passing of a tool-car in the 
subway underneath the cemetery, and the 
hammering of a workman at a forge in a niche 
of the tunnel. But, rising out of the tombs, it 
was gruesome and unearthly in the night- 
quiet. 

The sparrows did not mind the sound. Maybe 
it ascended as a pleasant murmur to them and 
shaped their dreams, as dream-stuff drifts to 
their sweet- voiced cousins in the meadows with 
the lap and lave of the streams. A carriage 
rolled by. The clank of hoofs disturbed none of 
them. Some one slammed the door of an apothe- 
cary-shop across the street, and hurried off. Not 
a sparrow stirred. 

I was trying to see whether the birds slept 
with their heads beneath their wings. Appa- 
[98] 



rently they did, for I could not make out a head, 
though some of the sleepers hung over the street 
within ten feet of the lamp-post. But they were 
all above the light, with only their breasts out of 
the shadows, and to be certain I must make a 
bird move. Finding that the noises were not 
likely to arouse them, I threw a stick against 
one of the laden limbs. There were heads then, 
plenty of them, and every one, evidently, had 
been turned back and buried in the warm wing- 
coverts. 

My stick hit very near the toes of one of the 
sparrows, and he flew. There was a twitter, 
then a stir all over the tree ; but nothing further 
happening, they tucked in their heads again and 
went back to bed. 

I waited. At four o'clock they still slept. 
The moon had swung out from behind the high 
buildings and now hung just above the slender 
spire of Park Street Church, looking down into 
the deep, narrow street gulch. A cat picked her 
way among the graves, sprang noiselessly to the 
top of a flat tomb beneath the sparrows, and 
watched with me. The creature brought the 
wilderness with her. After all, this was not so 
[99] 



L.ofC. 



far removed from the woods. lu the empty 
street, beneath the silent, shuttered walls, with 
something still of the mystery of the night winds 
in the bare trees, the scene, for an instant, was 
touched with the spell of the dark and the un- 
tamed. 

After a swift warming walk of fifteen minutes 
I returned to the roost. There were signs of 
waking now : a flutter here, a twitter there, 
then quiet again, with no general movement 
until half-past four, when the city lights were 
shut off. Then, instantly, from a dozen branches 
sounded loud, clear chirps, and every sparrow 
opened his eyes. The incandescent bulbs about 
the border of the roost were moon and stars to 
them, lights in the firmament of their heaven 
to divide the night from the day. When they 
blazed forth, it was evening— bedtime ; when 
they went out, it was morning — the time to 
wake up. 

The softness of dusk, how unknown to these 
city dwellers ! and the fresh sweet beauty of the 
dawn ! 

Morning must have begun to break along 
near four o'clock, for the cold gray across the 
[100] 



sky was already i^assing into pearl. The coun- 
try birds had been up half an hour, I am sure. 
However, the old cemetery was wide enough 
awake now. There was chirping everywhere. 
It grew louder and more general every moment, 
till shortly the six thousand voices, and more, 
were raised in the cheerful din— the matin, if 
you please, for as yet only a few of the birds 
were fighting. 

But the fight quickly spread. It is the Eng- 
lish sparrow's way of waking up 5 his way of 
whetting his appetite for breakfast ; his way of 
digesting his dinner 5 his way of settling his 
supper— his normal waking way. 

To the clatter of voices was added the flutter 
of wings ; for the birds had begun to shift 
perches, and to exchange slaps as well as to call 
names— the movement setting toward the tree- 
tops. None of the sparrows had left the roost. 
The storm of chatter increased and the buzz of 
wings quickened into a steady whir, the noise 
holding its own with that of the ice-wagons 
pounding past. The birds were filling the toj)- 
most branches, a gathering of the clans, evi- 
dently, for the day's start. The clock in ScoUay 
[101] 



Square station pointed to ^ve minutes to five, 
and just before the hour sti'uck, two birds 
launched out and spun away. 

The exodus had commenced. The rest of 
Boston was not stirring yet. It was still early ; 
hardly a flush of warmth had washed the pearl. 
But the sparrows had many matters to attend to 
before all the milkmen and bakers got abroad : 
they must take their morning dust-bath, for one 
thing, in the worn places between the cobble- 
stones, before the street-sprinkler began its 
sloppy rounds. 

There was a constant whirl out of the tree- 
tops now. Occasionally a bird flew off alone, 
but most of them left in small flocks, just as I 
should see them return in the evening. Doubt- 
less the members of these flocks were the birds 
belonging to certain neighborhoods, those that 
nested and fed about certain squares, large door- 
yards, and leafy courts. They may indeed have 
been families that were hatched last summer. 

The birds that left singly went away, as a rule, 
over the roofs toward the denser business sec- 
tions of the city, Avhile the bands, as I had no- 
ticed them come in at night, took the opposite 
[102] 



course, toward Cambridge and Charlestowu. 
Not more than one iu a hundred flew south 
across the city. 

Of course there are sparrows all over Boston. 
There is no street too narrow, too noisy, too 
dank with the smell of leather for them. They 
seem as numerous where the rush of drays is 
thickest as in the open breathing-places where 
the fountains play. They are in every quarter, 
yet those to the east and south of the old burial- 
ground do not belong to the roost. Perhaps 
they have graveyards of their own in their sec- 
tions, though I have been unable to find them. 
So far as I know, this is the only roost in or 
about Boston. And this is the stranger since so 
few of the total number of the Boston sparrows 
sleep here. A careful estimate showed me that 
there could not have been more than six or 
seven thousand in the roost. One would almost 
say there were as many millions in Boston. 
And where do these millions sleep? For the 
most part, each one alone behind his sign-board 
or shutter near his local feeding-grounds. 

Now, why should the sparrows of the roost 
prefer King's Chapel Burial Ground to the Old 
[103] 



Gmu'cirj, a stone's throw up the street 1 I passed 
the Old Granary yard on my way to the roost 
and found the trees empty. I searched the 
limbs with my glass 5 there was not a sparrow to 
be seen. Still, the Granary is the less exposed 
of the two. It may not formerly have been so ; 
but at present high sheltering walls bend about 
the trees like a well. Years ago, perhaps, when 
the sparrows began to roost in the trees at 
King's Chapel, the Old Granary elms were more 
open to the winds, and now force of habit and 
example keep the birds returning to the first 
lodge. 

Back they come, no matter what the weather. 
There are a thousand cozy corners into which a 
sparrow might creep on a stormy night, where 
even the winds that know their way through 
Boston streets could not search him out. But 
the instinct to do as he always has done is as 
strong in the sparrow, in spite of his love for 
liioneering, as it is in the rest of us. He was 
brought here to roost as soon as he could fly, 
when the leaves were on and the nights deli- 
cious. If the leaves go and the nights change, 
what of that? Here he began, here he will con- 
[104] 



tiiiiie to sleep. Let it rain, blow, snow j let the 
sleet, like a slimy serpent, creep up the trunk 
and wrap around the twigs : still he will hold 
on. Many a night I have seen them sleeping 
through a driving winter rain, their breasts to 
the storm, their tails hanging straight down, 
shedding every drop. If a gale is blowing, and 
it is cold, they get to the leeward of the tree, as 
close to the trunk as possible, and anchor fast, 
every bill pointing into the wind, every feather 
reefed, every tail lying out on the flat of the 
storm. 

As I watched the bauds starting from the tree- 
tops of the roost I wondered if they really 
crossed the river into Cambridge and Charles- 
town. A few mornings later I was again up 
early, hastening down to the West Boston Bridge 
to see if I could discover the birds going over. As 
I started out I saw bunches moving toward the . 
river with a free and easy flight, but whether I 
reached the bridge too late, or whether they 
scattered and went over singly, I do not know. 
Only now and then did a bird cross, and he 
seemed to come from along the shore rather 
than from above the house-tops. 
[105] 



I concluded that the birds of the roost were 
strictly Bostonians. One evening, however, about 
a week later, as I was upon this bridge coming 
from Cambridge, a flock of sparrows whizzed 
past me, dipped over the rail to the water, 
swung up above the wall of houses, and disap- 
peared toward the roost. They were on their 
way from Cambridge, from the classic elms of 
Harvard campus, who knows, to the elms of the 
ancient burial-ground. 

It was five that April morning when the first 
sparrow left the roost. By half-past five the 
trees were empty, except for the few birds whose 
hunting-ground included the cemetery. By this 
time the city, too, had yawned, and rubbed its 
eyes, and tumbled out of bed. 



[106] 



^^MUX" 




'' MUX " 



NO, "Mux" is not an elegant name— not to 
be compared with Eonald or Claudia, for 
instance ; and I want to say it is not tlie name 
of one of my children, though its owner was 
once a member of my household. Mux was a 
tame half- grown coon, with just the ordinary 
number of rings around his tail, but with the 
most extraordinary amount of mischief in his 
little coon soul. Perhaps he had no real soul, 
and I should have located his mischief some- 
where else. If so, then I should say in his feet. 
I never saw any other feet so expressive. The 
[109] 



essence of the little beast seemed concentrated 
in his fore paws. If they made trouble, whose 
fault was it? They were designed for trouble. 
You could see this purpose in them as plainly 
as you could see the purpose in a swallow's 
wings. Whenever Mux ran across the yard 
these paws picked up trouble out of the turf, 
just as if the grass were trouble-filings, and Mux 
a kind of four-footed magnet. He ncA^er went 
far before they clogged and stopped him. 

One day, the first day that Mux was given the 
liberty of the yard, who should he run foul of 
but Tom ! The struggle had to come sometime, 
and it was just as well that it came thus early, 
while Tom and Mux were on an equal footing 
as to size, for Mux was young and growing. 

Tom was boss of the yard. Every farmer's 
dog that went to town by our gate knew enough 
to pass by on the other side. Tom had grown a 
little lordly and opinionated. He was sleeping 
in the sun on the shed-step as Mux ambled up. 
At sight of the coon Tom rose in more than his 
usual feline mightiness and cast such a look of 
surprise, scorn, and annihilating intent upon the 
interloper as ought to have struck terror to the' 
[110] 



stoutest heart. But Mux hardly seemed to un- 
derstand. On he came, right into certain de- 
struction, a very lamb of innocence and meek- 
ness. O you unsuspecting little stranger ! 
Don't you see this awful monster swelling, swell- 
ing into this hideous hump*? No, Mux did not 
see him. Tom was raging. His teeth gleamed ; 
his eyes blazed green 5 his claws worked in a 
nervous way that made my flesh creep. He 
was vanishing, not, like the Cheshire Cat, into a 
long lovely grin, but vanishing from a four- 
legged cat into a yellow, one-legged hump. All 
that was left of him now was hump. 

Mux was only a few feet away. Tom began 
to advance, not directly, but just a trifle on the 
bias, across Mux's bows so to speak, as if to give 
him a broadside. They were within range. 
Tom was heaving to. I trembled for the young 
coon. Suddenly there was a hiss, a flash of yel- 
low in the air, and— a very big surprise await- 
ing Thomas ! That little coon was no stupid 
after all. He had not rolled up his sleeves, nor 
doubled up his fists, nor put a chip upon his 
shoulder ; but he knew what was expected of 
him, just the same. He snapped instantly upon 

[111] 



his back, received the cat with all four of his 
feet, and gave Mr. Tom such a combing down 
that his golden fur went flying off like thistle- 
down in autumn. 

It was all over in less than half a minute. I 
think Tom must have made a new record for 
himself in the running high jump when he broke 
away from his ring-tailed antagonist. He struck 
out across the yard and landed midway up the 
clothes-post with a single bound. And Mux? 
He ambled on around the yard, as calm and un- 
concerned as if he had only stopped to scratch 
himself. 

Much of this unconcern, however, was a quiet 
kind of swagger. When he thought no one 
fiercer than a chicken or the humbled Mr. Tom 
was looking, he would shuffle across the yard 
with his coat collar turned up, tiis hat over his 
eye, his elbows angled— just as if he had been 
born and bred on the Bowery instead of in the 
Bear Swamp. He was king of the yard, but I 
could see that he wore his crown uneasily. He 
kept a bold front, accepted every challenge, and 
even went out of his way to pick a quarrel ; yet 
he quaked at heart continually. He feared and 
[112] 



hated the noises of the yard, particularly the 
crowiDg of our big buff cochin rooster and the 
screaming of the guineas. This was one of the 
swamp -fears that he had brought with him and 
could not outlive. It haunted him. If he had a 
conscience, its only warnings were of coming 
noises great and terrible. 

But Mux had no conscience, unless it was one 
that troubled him only when he was out of mis- 
chief. His face was never so long and so solemn 
as when I had caught him in some questionable 
act or spoiled some wayward plan. 

Mux, however, was possessed by a much stub- 
borner spirit than this interesting mischief- devil. 
Upon one point he was positively demented — 
the only four-footed maniac I ever knew. He 
had gone crazy on the subject of dirt, mad to 
wash things, especially his victuals. 

He was not particular about what he ate ,♦ al- 
most anything that could be swallowed would 
do, provided that it could be washed, and 
washed by himself, after his own approved 
fashion. 

If I gave him half of my apple, he would 
squat down by his wash-tub and begin to hunt 
8 [113] 



for dirt. He would look the apple over and 
over, pick around the blossom end, inspect care- 
fully, then pull out the stem, if there happened 
to be a stem, dig out the seeds and peek into 
the core, then douse it into the water and begin 
to wash. He would rub with might and main 
for a second or two, then rinse it, take a bite, 
and douse it back again for more scrubbing, 
until it was scrubbed and chewed away. 

Even when the water was thick with mud, 
this crazy coon persisted in washing his clean 
cake and cabbage therein. Indeed, the muddier 
the water, the more vigorously would he wash. 
The habit was a part of him, as real a thing in 
his constitution as the black ring in his fur. It 
was a very dirty habit, here in captivity, even 
if it went by the name of washing. Of course 
Mux could not be blamed for his soiled wash- 
water. That was my fault ; only I could n't be 
changing it every time he soaked up a fistful of 
earth in his endeavor to wash something to eat 
out of it. No ; he was not at fault, altogether, 
for the mud in his tub. Out in the Bear Swamp, 
the streams that wandered about under the 
great high-spreading gums, and lost their way 
[114] 



ill the shadows^ were crystal-clear and pure ; and 
out there it was intended that he should dwell, 
and ill those sweet streams that he should wash. 
But what a modicum of wit, of originality the 
little beast had, that, because he was born a 
washer, wash he must, though he washed in mud, 
nay, though he washed upon the upturned bot- 
tom of his empty tub !— for this is what Mux 
did sometimes. 

I never blamed Aunt Milly for insisting upon 
this rather ill-sounding name of Mux" for the 
little coon. She was standing by his cage, 
shortly after his arrival, watching him eat cab- 
bage. He washed every clean white piece of it in 
his oozy tub before tasting it, coating the bits over 
with mud as you do the lumps of fondant with 
chocolate in making ''■ chocolate creams." Aunt 
Milly looked at him for some time with scornful 
face and finally exclaimed : 

^' Umph ! Dat animile am a dumb beast shu' ! 
Rubbin' dirt right inter clean cabbage ! Sich 
muxin' ! mux, mux, mux ! Dat a coon *? Dat 
ain't no coon. Dat 's a mux ! " And she scuffed 
off to the house, mumbling, '^ De muxinest thing 
I done evah seen." Hence his name. 
[115] 



If there is one sweetmeat sweeter than all 
others to a coon, it is a frog. It was not mere 
chance that Mux was born in the edge of the 
Bear Swamp, close to the wide marshes that ran 
out to the river. This was the great country of 
the frogs— the milk-and-honey country to the 
ring-tailed family in the hollow gum. But Mux 
had never tasted frog. He had not been weaned 
when I kidnapped him. One day, wishing to 
see if he knew what a frog was, I carelessly 
offered him a big spotted fellow that I had 
caught in the meadow. 

Did he know a frog? He fairly snatched the 
poor thing from me, killed it, and started around 
the cage with it in his mouth, dancing like a 
cannibal. His long, serious face was more 
thoughtful and solemn, however, than usual. I 
was puzzled. I had heard of dancing at fune- 
rals. Either this was such a dance, or else some 
wild orgy to propitiate the spirits that preside 
over the destiny of coons. 

Throughout this gruesome rite Mux held the. 

frog in his mouth, and I watched, expecting, 

hoping every moment that he would swallow it. 

Suddenly he stopped, sat down by his tub, 

[110] 



pulled some dead grass out of it, pluuged the 
frog in, and began to scrub it— began to scrub 
the frog in the oozy contents of that tub, when 
the poor amphibian had been soaking in spring- 
water ever since it was a tadpole ! 

No matter. The frog must be washed. And 
washed it was. It was scoured first with all his 
might, then placed in the bottom of the tub, 
under water, held down by one fore paw, until 
the maniac could get in with his hind feet upon 
it, and then danced upon 5 from here it was laid 
upon the floor of the cage and kneaded until as 
limp as a lump of dough f then lifted daintily, it 
was shaken round and round in the water, rinsed 
and wrung, and minutely inspected, and— swal- 
lowed. 

I felt justified in keeping this animal caged. 
He was not fit to run loose even in the Bear 
Swamp. Perhaps I have done him wrong in 
this story of the frog. Frogs may need washing, 
after all, despite the fact that they are never out 
of the bath-tub long enough to dry off once in 
their whole lives. Mux knew more about frogs 
than I, doubtless. But Mux insisted upon wash- 
ing oysters. 

[117] 



Now there are few people clothed in sane 
minds who do not like raw oysters. Mark this, 
however : when you see a person wash raw oys- 
ters, keep out of his way j he has lost either his 
wits or his morals. The only two creatures I 
ever knew to wash raw oysters were Mux and 
an oyster-dealer in Cambridge Street, Boston. I 
saw this dealer take up a two-gallon can that had 
just arrived at his store, and dump the dark 
salty shell -fish into a great colander, stick the 
end of a piece of rubber hose in among them, 
turn the water on, and stir and soak them. How 
white they got ! How fat they got ! How their 
ghastly corpses swelled ! 

Mux did not wash his to see them swell, but 
simply that he might take no chances with dirt 
— or poison, for I used to think sometimes that 
he thought I was trying to poison him. He was 
desperately fond of oysters. But who could cast 
his pearls, or, to be scientifically and literally 
correct, his mothers of pearls, before such a 
swine? Mux had just one plateful of oysters 
while I was his keeper. They were nice plump 
fellows, and when I saw the maniac soak one all 
stringy and tasteless I poured his wash-water 
[118] 



out. AVas he to be balked that way? No, no. 
He took oyster number two, flopped it into the 
empty tub, scoured it around on the muddy 
bottom, looked it over as carefully as he had 
done stringy number one, and swallowed sandy, 
muddy number two with just as much relish. 

This was too much. I cuffed him and took 
away the tub. This I suppose was wrong, for 
I understand you must never oppose crazy per- 
sons. Well, Mux helped himself to oyster num- 
ber three. There was no water, no tub. But 
what were oysters for if not to be washed? 
And who was he but Frocyon lotor—Frocyon 
^^the washer"? Can the leopard change his 
spots or the racoon his habits ? Can he ? Shall 
he? I could almost hear him muttering under 
his breath, ^^To be, or not to be : that is the 
question." Then he darted a triumphantly ma- 
licious glance at me, retreated to the back of his 
cage, thrust his oyster out of sight beneath the 
straw of his bed, and washed it— washed the oys- 
ter in the straw, washed it into a fistful of sticks 
and chaff, and gloated as he swallowed it. 



[119] 



EACOON CEEEK 




KACOON CREEK 

Into the wode to her the briddes sing. 







kYER the creek, and clearing it by a little, 



hung a snow-white, stirless mist, its under 
surface even and parallel with the face of the 
water, its upper surface peaked and billowed half- 
way to the tops of the shore-skirting trees. 

As I dipped along, my head was enveloped in 
the cloud 5 but bending over the skiff, I could see 
far up the stream between a mist-ceiling and a 
water-floor, as through a long, low room. How 
deep and dark seemed the water! And the 
[123] 



trees how remote, aerial, and floating ! as if 
growing in the skies, with no roots' fast hold of 
the earth. Filling the valley, conforming to 
every bend and stretch of the creek, lay the 
breath of the water, motionless and sheeted, a 
spirit stream, hovering over the sluggish current 
a moment, before it should float upward and 
melt away. It was cold, too, as a wraith might 
be, colder than the water, for the June sun had 
not yet risen over the swamp. 

At the bridge where the road crossed was a 
dam which backed the creek out into an acre or 
more of pond. Not a particle of mud discolored 
the water ; but it was dark, and as it came 
tumbling, foaming over the moss-edged gates it 
lighted up a rich amber color, the color of strong 
tea. In the half chill of the dawn the old bridge 
lay veiled in smoking spray, in a thin, rising- 
vapor of spicy odors, clean, medicinal odors, as 
of the brewing of many roots, the fragrance of 
shores of sedges, ferns, and aromatic herbs steeped 
in the slow, soft tide. And faint across the 
creek, the road, and the fields lay the pondy smell 
of spatter-docks. 

I pushed out from the sandy cove and lay 
[124] 



\7itli a reach of the lusty docks between me and 
either shore. It was early morning. The yellow, 
dew-laid road down which I came still slumbered 
undisturbed ; the village cows had not been 
milked, and the pasture slope, rounding with a 
feminine grace of curve and form, lay asleep, 
with its sedgy fingers trailing in the water 5 even 
the locomotive in the little terminal round- 
house over the hill was not awake and wheezing. 
But the creek people were stirring — except the 
frogs. They were growing sleepy. The long 
June night they had improved, soberly, philo- 
sophically f and now, seeing nothing worth while 
in the dawn of this wonder day, they had begun 
to doze. But the birds were alive, full of the 
crisp June morning, of its overflow of gladness, 
and were telling their joy in chorus up and down 
both banks of the creek. 

Hearkneth thise blisful briddes how they singe. 

Do you mean out in Fiusbury Moor, Father 
Chaucer'? They were sweet along the banks of 
the Walbrook, I know, for among them ^'maken 
melody e " were the skylark, ethereal minstrel ! 
and the nightingale. But, Father Chaucer, you 
[125] 



should have heard the wood-thrushes, the orchard- 
orioles— this whole morning chorus singing along 
the creek ! No one may know how blissful, how 
wide, how thrilling the singing of birds can be 
unless he has listened when the summer mists 
are rising over Racoon Creek. 

There is no song-hour after sunrise to compare 
with this for spirit and volume of sound. The 
difference between the singing in the dusk and 
in the dawn is the difference between the slow, 
sweet melody of a dirge and the triumphant, 
full-voiced peal of a wedding march. Even one 
who has always lived in the country can scarcely 
believe his ears the first time he is afield in 
June at the birds' awaking-hour. 

Robins led the singing along the creek. They 
always do. In New Jersey, Massachusetts, Mich- 
igan,— everywhere it is the same, — they out- 
number all rivals three to one. It is necessary 
to listen closely in order to distinguish the other 
voices. This particular morning, however, the 
"wood-thrushes were all arranged up the copsy 
hillside at my back, and so reinforced each other 
that their part was not overborne by robin song. 
One of the thrushes was perched upon a willow 
[120] 



stub along the edge of the water, so near tliat I 
could see every flirt of his wings, could almost 
count the big spots in his sides. Softly, calmly, 
with the purest joy he sang, pausing at the end 
of every few bars to preen and call. His song 
was the soul of serenity, of all that is spiritual. 
Accomp'anied by the lower, more continuous 
notes from among the trees, it rose, a clear, pure, 
wonderful soprano, lifting the whole wide chorus 
nearer heaven. 

Farther along the creek, on the border of 
the swamp, the red-shouldered blackbirds were 
massed ; chiming in everywhere sang the cat- 
birds, white-eyed vireos, yellow warblers, or- 
chard-orioles, and Maryland yellowthroats ; and 
at short intervals, soaring for a moment high 
over the other voices, sounded the thrilling, 
throbbing notes of the cardinal, broken suddenly 
and drowned by the roll of the flicker, the wild, 
weird cry of the great-crested flycatcher, or the 
rapid, hay-rake rattle of the belted kingfisher. 

All at once a narrow breeze cut a swath through 
the mist just across my bows, turned, spread, 
caught the severed cloud in which I was drift- 
ing, and whirled it up and away. The head of 
[127] 



the pond and the upper creek were still shrouded, 
while around me only breaths of the white flecked 
the water and the spatter-docks. The breeze 
had not stirred a ripple ; the current here in 
the broad of the pond was imperceptible ; and I 
lay becalmed on the edge of the open channel, 
among the rank leaves and golden knobs of the 
docks. 

A crowd of chimney-swallows gathered over 
the pond for a morning bath. Half a hundred 
of them were wheeling, looping, and cutting 
about me in a perfect maze of orbits, as if so 
many little black shuttles had borrowed wings 
and gone crazy with freedom. They had come 
to wash — a very proper thing to do, for there 
are few birds or beasts that need it more. It 
was highly fitting for sooty little Tom, seeing he 
had to turn into something, to become a Water 
Baby. And if these smaller, winged sweeps of 
our American chimneys are contemplating a 
metamorphosis, it ought to be toward a similar 
life of soaking. 

They must have been particularly sooty this 
morning. One plunge apiece, so far from sufficing, 
seemed hardly a beginning. They kept diving 
[128] 



in over aud over, continuing so long that finally 
I grew curious to know how many dips they 
were taking, and so, in order to count his dives, 
I singled one out, after most of the flock had 
done and gone off to hawk. How many he had 
taken before I marked him, and how many more 
he took after I lost him among the other birds, 
I cannot say ; but, standing up in the skiff, I 
followed him around aud around until he made 
his nineteenth splash,— in less than half as many 
minutes,— when I got so groggy that his twen- 
tieth splash I came near taking with him. 

The pond narrows toward the head, and just 
before it becomes a creek again the channel turns 
abruptly through the docks in against the right 
shore, where the current curls and dimples 
darkly under the drooping branches of great red 
maple ; then it horseshoes into the middle, com- 
ing down through small bush-islands and tangled 
brush which deepen into an extensive swamp. 

June seemed a little tardy here, but the elder, 
the rose, and the panicled cornel were almost 
ready, the button-bushes were showing ivory, 
while the arrow-wood, fully open, was glistening 
snowily everywhere, its tiny flower crowns fall- 
9 [129] 



iug and floating in patches down-stream, its over- 
sweet breath hanging heavy in the morning mist. 
My nose was in the air all the way for magnolias 
and water-lilies, yet never a whiff from either 
shore, so particular, so unaccountably notional 
are some of the high- caste flowers with regard 
to their homes. 

The skiff edged slowly past the first of the 
islands, a mere hummock about a yard square, 
and was turning a sharp bend farther up, when 
I thought I had a glimpse of yellowish wings, a 
mere guess of a bird shadow, dropping among the 
dense maple saplings and elder of the islet. 

Had I seen or simj)ly imagined something ? 
If I had seen wings, then they were not those of 
the thrasher,— the first bird that came to mind,— 
for they slipped, sank, dropped through the 
bushes, with just a hint of dodging in their 
movement, not exactly as a thrasher would 
have moved. 

Drifting noiselessly back, I searched the tangle 
and must have been looking directly at the bird 
several seconds before cutting it out from the 
stalks and branches. It was a least bittern, a 
female. She was clinging to a perpendicular 
[130] 



stem of elder, hand over hand, wren fashion, her 
long neck thrust straight into the air, absolutely 
stiff and statuesque. 

We were less than a skiff's length apart, each 
trying to outpose and outstare the other. I 
won. Human eyes are none the strongest, nei- 
ther is human patience, yet I have rarely seen a 
creature that could outwait a man. The only 
steady, straightforward eye in the Jungle was 
Mowgli's— because it was the only one with a 
steady mind behind it. As soon as the bird let 
herself look me squarely in the eye, she knew 
she was discovered, that her little trick of turn- 
ing into a stub was seen through ; and immedi- 
ately, ruffling her feathers, she lowered her head, 
poked out her neck at me, and swaying from side 
to side like a caged bear, tried to scare me, glar- 
ing and softly growling. 

Off she flopped as I landed. The nest might 
be upon the ground or lodged among the bushes 5 
but the only ground space large enough was 
covered layer over layer with pearly clam-shells, 
the kitchen-midden of some muskrat 5 and the 
bushes were empty. I went to the other islets, 
searched bog and tangle, and finally pulled away 
[131] 



disappointed, giving the least bittern credit for 
considerable mother-wit and woodcraft. How 
little wit she really had appeared on my return 
down-creek that afternoon. 

I had now entered the high, overhanging 
swamp, where the shaggy trees, the looping vines, 
and the rank, pulpous undergrowth grew thick 
on both sides, reaching far back, a wet, heavy 
wilderness without a path, except for the silent 
feet of the mink and the otter, and the more 
silent feet of the creek, here a narrow stream 
winding darkly down through the shadows. 

Every little while along the rootj?^, hummocky 
banks of the creek I would pass a muskrat's 
slide. Here was one at the butt of a tulip-pop- 
lar, its platform wet aiul freshly trodden, its 
^^dive" shooting sheer over a root into the 
stream. Farther on stood a large tussock whose 
tojD was trami)led flat and covered with sedge- 
roots. I could not resist putting my nose down 
for a sniff, so good is the smell of a fresh trail, 
so close are we to the rest of the pack. In the 
thick of the swamp I stopped a moment to ex- 
amine the footprints of an otter at a shallow, 
shelving place along the bank, where, opening 
[132] 



through the skunk-cabbage and Indian turnip, 
and covered almost ankle-deep with water, was 
the creature's runway. 

I had moved leisurely along, yet not aim- 
lessly. The whole June day was mine to waste ; 
but it would not be well wasted if nothing more 
purposeful than wasting were in mind. 

One does not often drift to a port. Going 
into the woods to see anything is a very sure 
way of seeing little or nothing 5 and taking the 
path to anywhere is certain to lead one nowhere 
in particular. Many interested, nature-loving 
people fail to enjoy the out-of-doors simply be- 
cause they have no definite spot to reach, no 
flower, bird, or bug to find when they enter the 
fields and woods. Going forth ^Ho commune 
with nature" sounds very fine, but it is much 
more difficult work than conversing with the 
Sphinx. In order to draw near to nature I re- 
quire a pole with a hook and line on the end of 
it. While I watch the float and wait, if there 
is any communion, it is nature who holds it 
with me through the medium of the pole. I 
need to have an errand to do ; some berries to 
pick, a patch of potatoes to hoe (a very small 
[133] 



patcli) ; an engagement to keep, like Tlioreau, 
with a tree, if I hope to squander with profit 
even the laziest summer day. 

I was heading up-stream toward a deep 
sandy-sided pool that was bottomed, or rather 
unbottomed, by the shadows of overhanging 
beeches. The pool was alive with racoon- 
perch. A few mornings before this, a boy from 
a neighboring farm had come to fish here and 
had found a fisher ahead of him. He was just 
about to cast, when back under the limbs of the 
beeches the water broke, and a mink rose to the 
surface with a fine perch twisting in her jaws. 
Straight toward the boy she swam till within 
reach of his rod, when she recognized the hu- 
man in him, turned a back-dive somersault, 
and vanished. 

AVould she be fishing again this morning? I 
hoped so. It was her hour— the hour of the 
rising mist ; visitors rarely found their way to 
the pool 5 and I knew the appearance of the boy 
had given her no lasting alarm. 

Floating around the bend, I pulled in among 
the shore bushes by a bit of grape-vine, and sit- 
ting down upon it, made my boat fast. I had 
[134] 



planned the trip with the hope of seeing this 
mink ; so I waited, quite hidden, though hiiving 
the pool in full view. An hour passed, but no 
mink appeared. Another hour, and the sun 
was breaking upon the beeches, and the mist 
was gone 5 yet no mink came to fish. And what 
mink would ^ Of course you must have it in 
mind to see a mink fish if yon wish to see any- 
thing ; but the day you really catch the mink 
fishing will likely be the day you went out to 
watch for muskrats. 

So an hour's waiting is rarely fruitless. The 
mink did not come, but another and quite as 
expert a fisher did. All the way up the creek I 
had been hearing the throaty ghouw-bhouiv of a 
great blue heron off in the swamp. It was he 
that came for perch. 

The flapping of the great blue heron is a 
sight good for the soul— an unheard-of motion 
these days, so moderate, unhurried, and time- 
contemning ! The wing-beats of this one, as he 
came dangling down upon the meadow opposite 
me, have often given me pause since. If I could 
have the wings of the great blue heron and flap 
to my fishing now and again ! 
[135] 



On alighting^ however, lie was instantly all 
nerve and tension. With the utmost caution he 
came over the high sedges on his stilt-like legs 
to the brink of the creek and posed. I doubt if 
a frog or a minnow could have told he was a 
thing of life. Stiff as a stub, every muscle taut, 
all alert, he stood, till— flash ! and the long 
pointed bill pinned a perch, a foot and a half 
beneath the water. He had quite made out a 
breakfast, when, stepping upon a tall tussock, he 
stood face to face with me— a human spectator ! 
It was only for a moment that I could keep mo- 
tionless enough to puzzle him. Some muscle 
must have twitched, for he understood and 
leaped into the air with a croak of mortal fright. 



II 



The creek was roped off by the sagging fox 
grape-vines, and barred, from this point on, by 
the alders, so that I gave up all attempt at far- 
ther ascent. I had already given up the mink ; 
yet I waited under the beeches. 

It was blazing overhead, growing hotter and 
closer all the time, with hardly breeze enough to 
[136] 



disturb the sleep of the leaf shadows on the 
sleepy stream. A rusty, red-bellied water-snake, 
in a mat of briers near by, relaxed and straight- 
ened slowly out,— and softly, that I might not be 
attracted,— stretching himself to the warmth. I 
could have broken his back with my paddle, 
and perhaps, by so doing, saved the nestlings of 
a pair of Maryland yellowthroats fidgeting about 
near him. He had eaten many a young bird of 
these bushes, I was sure— yet only circumstan- 
tially sure. Catching him in the act of robbing 
a nest would have been different ; I should have 
felt justified then in despatching him. But to 
strike him asleep in the sun simply because he 
was a snake would have robbed the spot of part 
of its life and spirit and robbed me of serenity 
for the rest of the day. I should not have been 
able to enjoy the quiet again until I had said 
my prayers and slept. 

And as between the hawks and other wild 
birds, we need not interfere. While the water- 
snake was spreading himself, a small hawk, a 
sharp -shinned, I think, came beating over the 
meadow and was met by a vigilance committee 
of red-shouldered blackbirds. He did not stop 
[137] 



to eat any of them, but darted up, and they after 
him. On up he went, round and round in a 
rapid, mounting spiral, till only one of the dar- 
ing redwings followed. I watched. Up they 
went, higher than I had ever seen a blackbird 
venture before. And against such unequal 
odds ! But the hawk was scared and had not 
stopped to look back. He circled ; the black- 
bird cut across inside and caught him on almost 
every round. And still higher in pure bravado 
the redwing forced him. I began to tremble 
for the plucky bird, when I saw him turn, half 
fold his shining wings, and shoot straight down 
—a meteor of jet with fire flying from its opposite 
sides— down, down, while I held my breath. 
Suddenly the wings flashed, and he was scaling 
a steep incline ; another flash, a turn, and he 
was upon a slower plane— had thrown himself 
against the air and settled upon the swaying top 
of a brown cattail. 

A quiet had been creeping over the swamp 
and meadow. The dry rasp of a dragon-fly's 
wings was loud in the grass. The stream be- 
neath the beeches darkened and grew moody as 
the light neared its noon intensity ; the beech- 
[138] 



leaves hung limp and silent ; a catbird settled 
near me with dropped tail and head drawn in 
between her shoulders, as mute as the leaves ; 
the Maryland j^ellowthrpat broke into a sharp 
gallop of song at intervals,— he would have to 
clatter a little on doomsday, if that day fell in 
June,— but the intervals were far apart. The 
meadow shimmered. No part of the horizon 
was in sight — only the sky overhanging the 
little oi)en of grass, and this was cloudless, 
though far from blue. 

Perhaps there was not a real sign of uneasiness 
anywhere except in my boat 5 yet I felt some- 
thing ominous in this silent, stifled noon. After 
all, I ought to have scotched the rusty, red -bel- 
lied water-snake leering at me now. The croak 
of the great blue heron sounded again 5 then far 
away, mysterious and spirit-like, floated a soft 
qua^ qua, g%a— the cry of the least bittern out of 
the heart of the swamp. 

I loosed the grape-vine, put in my paddle, and 
turned down-stream, with an urgent desire to 
get out of the swamp, out where I could see 
about me. I made no haste, lest the stream, the 
swamp, the something that made me uneasy, 
[139] 



should know. Not that I am superstitions, 
though I should have been had I lived when the 
land was all swamp and wood and prairie j and 
I should be now were I a sailor. My boat slipped 
swiftly along under the thick-shadowing trees, 
and rounding a sharp bend, brought me to the 
open i)ond, to the sky, and to a sight that ex- 
plained my disquietude. The west, half-way to 
the zenith, was green— the black-and-blue green 
of bruised flesh. Out of it shot a fork of light- 
ning, and behind it rumbled muffled thunder. 

There was no time to descend the pond. I 
could already hear the wind across the silence 
and suspense. It was one of the supreme mo- 
ments of the summer. The very trees seemed 
breathless and awe-struck. Pushing quickly 
to the wooded shore, I drew out the boat, turned 
it over, and crawled under it just as the leaves 
stirred with the first cool, wet breath. 

There was an instant's lull, a tremor through 
the ground ; then the rending and crunching of 
the wind monster in the oaks, the shriek of the 
forest victim— and the wind was gone. The 
rain followed with fearful violence, the lightning 
sizzled and cracked among the trees, and the 
[140] 



thunder burst just above the boat— all holdiug 
on to finish the wind's work. 

It was soon over. The leaves were dripping 
when I crept out of my shell ; the afternoon sun 
was blinking through a million gleaming tears, 
and the storm was rumbling far away, behind 
the swamp. A robin lighted upon a branch over 
me, and set off its load of drops, which rattled 
down on my boat's bottom like a charge of shot. 
I glided into the stream. Down the pond where 
I had seen the sullen clouds was now an inde- 
scribable freshness and glory of shining hills and 
shining sky. The air had been washed and was 
still hanging across the heavens undried. The 
maple-leaves showed silver ; the flock of chim- 
ney-swifts had returned, and among them, twin- 
kling white and blue and brown, were tree- 
swallows and barn-swallows squeaking in their 
flight like new harness 5 a pair of night-hawks 
played back and forth across the water, too, 
awakened, probably, by the thunder, or else mis- 
taken in the green darkness of the storm, think- 
ing it the twilight ; and the creek up and down 
as far as I could hear was ringing with bird- 
calls. 

[141] 



There had been a perceptible rise and quick- 
ening of the current. It was slightly roiled and 
carried a floatage of broken twigs, torn leaves, 
with here and there a golden-green tulip -petal, 
like the broken wings of butterflies. 

I was in no hurry now, in no disquietude. 
The swamp and the storm were at my back. 
Before me lay the pond, the pastures, and the 
roofs of a human village— all bathed in the 
splendor of the year's divinest hour. It had not 
been a perfect day, but these closing hours were 
perfect, so perfect that they redeemed the whole, 
and not that day only : they were perfect 
enough to have redeemed the whole of creation 
travailing till then in pain. 

Because I turned from all this sunset glory to 
find out what little bird was making the very big 
fuss near by, and because, parting the foliage of 
an arrow- wood bush, I looked with exquisite 
pleasure into the nest of a white-eyed vireo, 
does it mean that I am still unborn as to souH 
For some reason it was a relief to look away 
from that west of vast and burning color to the 
delicately dotted eggs in the tiny cradle— the 
same relief felt in descending from a mountain- 
[U2] 



top to the valley ; in turniug from the sweep of 
the sea to watch beach-fleas hopping over the 
sand ; in giving over the wisdom of men for the 
gabble of my little boys. 

How the vireo scolded ! and her mate ! He 
half sang his threat and defiance. ^'Come, get 
out of this ! Come 5 do you hear'? " he cried over 
and over, as I peeked into the nest. It was a 
thick-walled, exquisite bit of a basket, rimmed 
round with green, growing moss, worked over 
with shredded bark and fragments of yellow 
wood from a punky stump across the stream, 
and suspended by spider-webs upon two parallel 
twigs about three feet above the water. It was 
not consciously worked out by the birds, of 
course, but the patch of yellow- wood fragments 
on the side of the nest exactly matched the size 
and color of the fading cymes of arrow-wood 
blossoms all over the bush, so that I mistook 
the little domicile utterly on first parting the 
leaves. A crow or a snake would never have 
discovered it from that side. 

Paddling down, I was soon out of earshot of 
the scolding vireos, but the little cock's vigor- 
ous, ringing song followed me to the head of the 
[143] 



pond. Flying heavily over from the meadows 
with folded neck and dangling legs came a little 
green heron— the ^'poke." I spun ronnd be- 
hind a big clump of elder to watch him ; but he 
saw me, veered, gulj)ed aloud, and pulled off 
with a rapid stroke up the creek. 

As I turned, my eye fell upon a soft, yellow- 
ish something in the rose-bushes across the 
docks. I was slow to believe. It was too good 
to be credited all at once. Within three paddle- 
lengths of my boat, in a patch of dark that must 
be a nest, stood my least bittern. 

I sat still for several seconds, tasting the joy of 
my discovery and anticipating the look into the 
nest. Then, upon my knees in the bow of the 
skiff, I pulled up by means of the stout dock- 
leaves until almost able to touch the bird, when 
she walked off down a dead stalk to the ground, 
clucking and growling at me. 

It was n't a nest to boast of ; but she might 
boast of her eggs, for there was more of eggs than 
of nest— a great deal more. A few sticks had 
been laid upon the ends of the bending rose- 
bushes, and this flimsy, inadequate platform was 
literally covered by the five dirty-white eggs. 
[U4] 



The hen had to stand on the bushes straddling 
the nest in order to brood. How she ever got as 
close to the nest as that without spilling its con- 
tents was hard to see ; for I took an egg out and 
had the greatest difficulty in putting it back, so 
little room was there, so near to nothing for it 
to rest upon. 

Working back into the channel, I gave the 
skiff to the easy current and drew slowly along 
toward the foot of the pond. 

The sun had gone down behind the hill 5 the 
flame had faded from the sky, and over the 
rim of the circling slopes poured the soft, cool 
twilight, with a breeze as soft and cool, and a 
spirit that was prayer. Drifting across the 
pond as gently as the gray half-light fell a 
shower of lint from the willow catkins. The 
swallows had left ; but from the leafy darkness 
of the copse in front of me, piercing the dreamy, 
foamy roar of the distant dam, came the notes 
of a wood- thrush, pure, sweet, and peaceful, 
speaking the soul of the quiet time. My boat 
grated softly on the sandy bottom of the cove 
and swung in. Out from the deep shadow of the 
wooded shore, out over the pond, a thin white 
10 [ 145 ] 



veil was creeping— the mist, the breath of the 
sleeping water, the spirit of the stream. And 
aw^ay up the creek a distorted, inarticulate 
sound— the hoarse, guttural croak of the great 
blue heron, the weird, uncanny cry of the night, 
the mock, the menace of the tangled, untamed 
swamp ! 



[146] 



THE DRAGON OF THE SWALE 




THE DRAGON OF THE SWALE 

MY patli to Cubby Hollow ran aloug a tum- 
bling worm- fence, down a gravelly slope, 
and across a strip of swale, through which flowed 
the stream that farther on widened into the 
Hollow. A small jungle of dog-roses, elder, and 
blackberry tangled the banks of the stream, 
spreading into flanks of cinnamon-fern that crept 
well up the hillsides. 

As I descended the gravelly slope, my path led 
through the ferns into a tunnel of vines, to a 
rail over the water, and on up to the woods. By 
the middle of June the tangle, except by the 
half-broken path, was almost rabbit-proof. The 
[149] 



rank ferns waved to my chin, and were so thick 
that they left little trace of my passing until late 
in the summer. 

This bit of the swale from the lower edge of 
the gravelly slope to the edge of the woods on 
the opposite slope was the lair of a dragon. My 
path cut directly across it. 

Perhaps the dragon had been there ever since 
I had known the swale, and summer after sum- 
mer had allowed me to cross unchallenged. I 
do not know. I only know that one day he rose 
out of the ferns before me — the longest, ugliest, 
boldest beast that ever withstood me in the quiet 
walks about home. 

It was a day in early July, hot and very close. 
I was wading the sunken trail, much as one 
"treads water," my head not always above the 
surface of the fronds, when, suddenly, close to 
my side the ferns in a single spot were violently 
shaken. Instantly ahead of me they whirled 
again; and before I could think, off across the 
path was another rush and whirl — then stirless 
silence. 

I knew what it meant. These were not the 
sudden, startled leaps of three animals, but the 
[150] 



lightning movements of one. I liad crossed the 
path of a swamp black -snake, and judging from 
the speed and whirl, it was a snake of uncommon 
size. 

The path, a few paces farther on, opened into 
a small patch of low grass. Just as I was getting 
through the brake to this spot I stopped short 
with a chill. In the ferns near me shrilled a 
hissing whistle, a weird, creepy whistle that 
made me cold — a fierce, menacing sound, all 
edge, and so thin that it slivered every nerA^e 
in me. And then, without a stir in the brake, 
up out of the low grass in front of me rose a 
blue-black, glittering head. 

I have little faith in the spell of a snake's eye, 
yet for a moment I was held by the subtle, mas- 
terful face that had risen so unexpectedly, so 
coolly before me. It was lifted a foot out of the 
grass. The head upon its lithe, round neck was 
poised motionless, but set as with a hair-spring. 
The flat, pointed face was turned upon me, so 
that I could see a patch of white upon the throat. 
Evidently the snake had just sloughed an old 
skin, for the sunlight gleamed iridescent on the 
shining jet scales. It was not a large head ; it 
[151] 



lacked the shovel-nose and the heavy, horrid 
jaws of the rattle-snake. But it was clean-cut, 
with power in every line of jaw and neck ; with 
power and speed and certainty in the pose, so 
easy, ready, and erect. There was no fear in 
the creature's eye, something rather of aggres- 
siveness, and of such evil cunning that I stood 
on guard. 

Afraid of a snake ? of a black -snake? No. I 
think, indeed, there are few persons who really 
do fear snakes. It is not fear, but nerves. I 
have tamed more black -snakes than I have 
killed. I should not care a straw if one bit me. 
Yet, for all of that, the meeting with any black- 
snake is so unlooked for as always to be unnerv- 
ing. But let a huge one whip about you in the 
brake, chill you with an unearthly hissing 
whistle, then suddenly rise in front of you, 
glittering, challenging, sinister ! You will be 
abashed. I was ; and I shall never outgrow the 
weakness. 

It was a big snake. I had not been mistaken 

in its size. There is nothing on earth that 

shrinks as a dead snake ; and this one, so far as I 

know, is still alive ; yet, allowing generously for 

[152] 



my imagination, I am sure the creature measured 
six feet. His neck, just behind the jaws, was 
nearly the size of a broom-handle, which meant 
a long, hard length curved out in the ferns be- 
hind. It was a male ; I could tell by the peculiar 
musk on the air, an odor like cut cucumbers. 

Fully a minute we eyed each other. Then I 
took a step forward. The glittering head rose 
higher. Off in the ferns there beat a warning 
tattoo — the loud whir of the snake's tail against 
a skunk-cabbage leaf. 

In my hand was a slender dogwood switch 
that I had been poking into the holes of the 
digger-wasps up the hillside. If one thing more 
than another will turn a snake tail to in a hurry 
it is the song of a switch. Expecting to see this 
overbold fellow jump out of his new skin and 
lunge off into the swale, I leaned forward and 
made the stick sing under his nose. But he did 
not jump or budge. He only bent back out of 
range, swaj^ed from side to side, and drew more 
of his black length out into the low grass to 
better his position. 

The lidless eyes and scale-cased face of a snake 
might seem incapable of more than one set 
[153] 



expression. Can hate and fear show there? 
They certainly can, at least to my imagination. 
If ever hate and fear mantled a face, they did 
this one in the grass. The sound of the switch 
only maddened the creature. He had too long 
dictated terms in this part of the swale to crawl 
aside for me. 

Nor would I give way to him. But I ceased 
switching, drew back a step, and looked at him 
with more respect than I ever before showed a 
snake. 

The curved neck straightened at that, the 
glinting head swayed forward, and shivering 
through me as the swish of a stick never shivered 
through a snake, sounded that unearthly hissing 
whistle. For a second — for just the fraction of 
a second that it takes to jump — I was, not 
scared, but shocked 5 and I slipped on something 
underfoot. In three directions I wallowed the 
ferns before I got to my feet to watch the snake 
again, and by that time the snake was gone. 

I found myself somewhat muddy and breathing 
a little hard; but I was not wholly chagrined. 
I had heard and seen a black-snake whistle. I 
had never even known of the habit before. 
[15-t] 



Since then I have seen one other snake do it, 
and I think I have heard the sound three or 
four times. It is almost indescribable. The 
jaws were closed as it was made, not even the 
throat moving, that I could see. The air seemed 
to be blown violently through the nostrils, 
though sounding as if driven through the teeth— 
a shrilling hiss, fine and piercing, which one not 
so much hears as feels, crisping cold along his 
nerves. 

It may seem strange, but I believe this 
whistle is a mating-call. Even the forked 
tongue (or maybe the uose) of a snake grows 
vocal with love. If only the Sphinx had not pos- 
sessed a heart of stone ! No matter about its 
lips ; with a heart to know the ^^spriug running" 
we should have heard its story long ago. Per- 
haps, after all, the college sophomore was not 
mixing his observations and Sunday-school mem- 
ories when he wrote, describing the dawn of a 
spring morning (I quote from his essay) : ^'Be- 
neath in the water the little fishes darted about 
the boat 5 above the little birds twittered in the 
branches ; while off on a sunny log in the pond 
the soft, sibilant croak of the mud-turtle was 
[155] 



heard ou the shore." If we could happen upon 
the mud-tiirtle mad with love, I am sure we 
should find that he had a voice— a ''soft, sibilant 
croak/' who knows"? 

I had long known the tradition among the 
farmers of the black-snake's trailing its mate, 
following her by scent through grass and brush, 
persistent and sure as a sleuth-hound, until at 
last she is won. I had been told of this by eye- 
witnesses over and over, but I had always put it 
down as a snake story, for these same witnesses 
would also tell me the hoop-snake story, only it 
was their grandfathers, always, who had seen 
this creature take its tail in its mouth and roll, 
and hit and kill a fifty-dollar apple-tree (the 
tree was invariably worth fifty dollars). I had 
small faith in the trailing tale. 

One day, the summer after my encounter in 
the ferns, I was sitting upon a harrow at the 
edge of the gravelly field that slopes to the 
swale, when a large black-snake glided swiftly 
across the lane and disappeared in the grass be- 
yond. It had been gone perhaps a minute, 
when I heard another stir behind me, and 
turning, saw high above the weeds and dewberry- 
[156] 



vines the neck and head of a second bhick- 
snake. 

He was coming swiftly, evenly, carrying his 
gleaming head over a foot from the ground, and 
following hard upon the trail of the first snake. 
He hit very near the smooth, flowing mark in 
the dust of the lane. Here she had crossed. 
Here he was about to cross when he caught 
sight of me. 

For a startled instant he stiffened, threw him- 
self on the defensive, and showed a white patch 
under his chin, an ugly, blazing light in his eye, 
and a peculiarly aggressive attitude that there 
was no mistaking. I had seen this snake before. 
I knew him. He was the dragon of the swale. 

Only pausing, he whirled, struck the track, 
and sped on, his round black body stretching 
from rut to rut of the lane. A hundred feet 
beyond in the grass I saw his glittering head 
rise and sway with a swimming motion as he 
trailed the long, lithe beauty that was leading 
him this lightning race across the fields. 

This was not the last time he crossed my path. 
He never withstood me again 5 but he thwarted 
me several times. Once as I was descending the 

[157] 



slope I saw him gliding down from a low cedar. 
The distressing cries of two chippies told me 
what he had been doing in the tree ; I did not 
need to look at the half-dislodged nest. Then 
and there I vowed to kill him, but from that 
moment I never set eyes on him again. His 
evil work, however, went on. In a clnmx) of 
briers across the stream was the nest of a pair 
of redbirds that I was watching. One day just 
before the young could fly they were carried 
off. I knew who did it. On the same side, up 
under the fence by the woods, a litter of rabbits 
was destroyed. The snake killed them. It 
was he, too, who ate the eggs of the bluebirds 
in the old apple-tree along the fence in the ad- 
joining field. 

There must be a dragon in the way, I sup- 
pose—in the way even of nature study. There 
are unpleasant, perhaps unnecessary, and evil 
creatures— snakes !— in the fields and woods, 
which we must be willing to meet and tolerate 
for the love within us. Tick -seeds, beggar- 
needles, mud, mosquitos, rain, heat, hawks, and 
snakes haunt all our paths, hindering us some- 
times, though never really blocking the way. 
[158] 



But the dragon in the swale — ought I to tol- 
erate him? No. There are moments when I 
should be glad to kill him, yet I doubt if the 
swale would be quite so wild and thrilling a 
spot if I knew there was no dragon to meet me 
as I crossed. But the redbirds, bluebirds, rab- 
bits? I see no shrinking in their numbers be- 
cause of the snake. A few of them breed as 
they always have along the swale. There are 
worse enemies than the dragon, though he is 
bad enough. 



[159] 



TICKLE-BIKDS AND THE COCCINELLID^ 




TICKLE-BIEDS A:N'D THE COCCIXELLID^ 



JX a town where untrained observation rages, 
so the story goes, an elderly lady met an 
acquaintance in a shady avenue and asked her : 
" Do you know anything about birds? " 
'' No/' said the other ; ''1 'm sorry, but I 
don't." 

"Sorry! Oh, you 're such a relief! I just 
met Mrs. C, and she grasped my hand, gazed 
upward, and exclaimed : ' Oh, did you hear that 
perfectly lovely spike-beaked, purple-eyed 
tickle-bird!' 

[1G3] 



^' I had n't gone a block before I met Mrs. K. 
'Hush!' she said ecstatically. 'Don't move a 
muscle ! Eight up there on that branch is one 
of those rare, exquisite, speckle-winged, ring- 
tailed screamers.' 

'' You and I seem to be the only sane people 
left." 

I happen to know the above Mrs. C. and Mrs. 
K. personally. I meet them everywhere. 
When they are not listening to the puri)le-eyed 
tickle-bird, they are whispering '' Twinkle 
twinkle " to the stars, or calling, as they pace 
the beach, '' Koll on, thou deep and dark blue 
Ocean." They love the out-of-doors. They ex- 
claim over nature with the lips of all the poets. 
They adore her ! All the time they go about 
looking for wonderful i^urple-eyed tickle-birds 
and screamers, listening for wind voices, feeling 
for wave pulses, and dreaming, forever dream- 
ing, of how happy the morning stars must be 
that they sing together. 

All of which is good. An excellent thing it 
is to have a turn of rapture now and again. 
Nature herself will have one occasionally— in 
[164] 



June. But chronic ecstas}^, the extreme and not 
uncommon type of the afore-mentioned ladies, is 
a disease, a mental, a moral disease indeed, which 
must be cured before we can understand and 
really love the out-of-doors. Nature hates cant. 

We need to hear old Triton's wreathed horn 
— the oftener the better. The world of things, 
mere things, is still very much with us. We are 
in no danger from overmuch poetry. The 
trouble with the tickle-bird-screamer persons 
is not that they find too much poetry in nature, 
but that they really find none at all. For they 
do not look in the right place for it. Poetry is 
not in birds and sunsets and moonlight,— not in 
things,— but, like the kingdom of heaven and 
other things divine, it is in us, in ourselves. It 
is a mistake to go about, like Orlando and Mrs. 
C, sticking poems, the poets' poems, over earth 
and sea and sky, imagining that this is loving 
nature, that this is knowing the out-of-doors. 

How shall we see mice in the grass or hear 
toads in the puddles with our heads cloud- 
wreathed and our spirits afloat in the ether be- 
yond the stars ? Who wants to see mice or hear 
toads ^ Not Mrs. C, nor Mrs. K., nor many of 
[165] 



the rest of us, for what we feel is necessary, when 
loosed in the fields and woods, is to have those 
blank misgivings of the creature that moved 
about in worlds not realized. We have them, 
too, many of them, and exceedingly blank ones. 
Misgivings, of course, the naturalist will have. 
But he never hunts for them, not the blank 
species anyway. Nor does the poet. We think 
of Coleridge and Wordsworth tramping the 
Quantock Hills together seeking ecstasies and 
verses as we should seek heather and daisies. 
Far from it. A poet rarely has his raptures 
out-of-doors ; and he never runs one down. He 
roams the hills, seeing things. When he returns 
and begins to tliUilc about them, then he drinks 
the divine draught. 

I gazed — and gazed — but little thought 
What wealth the show to me had brought, 

says the poet, then adds : 

For oft, when on my couch I lie 
In vacant or in pensive mood, 

They flash upon that inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude ; 

And then my heart with pleasure fills. 

And dances with the daffodils. 

[166] 



The poet and the naturalist sekloni soar into 
heaven when the open sky is directly over them. 
They ride a centaur out-of-doors. They keep 
Pegasus stalled in the study. 

Every close, sympathetic observer of nature 
ought to hope and patiently work for those rare 
moments of wide, free vision when he stands 
upon the heights, when the veil of distance falls, 
shroudingall with largeness, mystery, and beauty. 
It is his rigrnt to 



'to^ 



Clasp the crag with crooked hands 
Close to the sun in lonely lands, 

as truly as the eagle's. Only he must not roost 
and nest there. Such visions are vouchsafed 
occasionally to prophets, poets, and at long in- 
tervals to naturalists and to common men. Pis- 
gah came but once to Moses, though his pathway 
ran forty years through the wilderness. We shall 
stand on Pisgah— but not until we have wan- 
dered awhile in the Plains of Moab. 

And what other way is there to Pisgah ? The 

only preparation of soul for the grand in nature 

is the study of the small and the near at hand. 

We must reckon infinite things in terms finite— 

[167] 



the Matterhorn by the hill in the old home pas- 
ture. 

I chanced to be on the summit of Mount 
Washington when the tickle-bird-screamer ladies 
arrived there. They came, as usual, with their 
thoughts trailing the edges of the universe, and 
climbed the mountain, as I knew they would, 
on the crazy, snorting little engine, stepping at 
once from the car into a world above the clouds. 
Better that way than never to stand upon the 
top at all. The railroad is a boon to the aged, 
the weak-headed, and all with uncertain hearts. 
But for the healthy, the vigorous, for all who 
want to pray up there, the only road is the path 
through the spruce to Hermit Lake, and up over 
the Head Wall of Tuckerman's Eavine. 

There is no preparation for the summit like 
the struggle through those narrow forest defiles 
and the climb over the grim Head AVall, and, 
just short of the peak, the sight of a tiny sand- 
wort in the Alpine Garden on the edge of the 
rent, rocky height. 

If infinite majesty rolls in upon the soul from 
the mountain -peak, no less does infinite beauty 
breathe from the little blossom plucked on our 
[168] 



ascent. One who can climb the mountain blind 
to the revelation, unaware of the mystery in the 
humblest flower-cup, has no eyes for the far- 
rolling mightiness of peak and plain and un- 
blurred boundary of sky revolving round, him on 
the summit. 

But it takes a trained eye to see the sand- 
wort, while any eye not totally blind can shift 
about in its socket and make out mountains from 
the top of Washington. 

The tickle-bird-screamer naturalists have a 
mere passing, fashionable madness. It came 
suddenly one day, during a parlor lecture on 
birds ; it will go away with the next dog-show. 

Such lovers are none the worse for their pas- 
sion 5 only they never come to know the out-of- 
doors. Poetry, lectures, nature-books are for 
them, and museums of stuffed, made things. 
The out-of-doors requires too much patience, 
alertness, insight, and sincerity. 

II 

As they sat on the porch, so this story goes, 

the school trustee casually called attention to a 

[160] 



familiar little orange -colored bug, with black 
spots on its back, that was crawling on the floor. 

^'I s'pose you know what that is? " he said. 

'^ Yes," replied the applicant, with conviction ; 
''that is a CoccineUa septempunctataJ^ 

''Young man," was the rejoinder, "a feller as 
don't know a lady bug when he sees it can't get 
my vote for teacher in this deestrict." 

Now it happens that I also know the young 
school-teacher of the above story. Indeed, I 
fall in with him oftener than with either Mrs. C. 
or Mrs. K. of the tickle -birds. He is college - 
bred. He observes nature "scientifically," he 
says. He knows what he knows, namely, that 
CoccineUa septempunctata is septempunctata and 
not novemnotata. All he knows (and what else 
is there to know?) is septempunctata and novem- 
notata— \l^e names of things, the places, parts, 
laws, and theories of things. He is the text-book 
naturalist. 

We have been afield together a few times, 

but I was never able to interest or surprise him, 

because there were no surprises left : he knew 

everything. He had dissected every flower, 

[1-0] ■ 



measured every bird, si nek a pin through every 
butterfly 5 he had a ghicial theory for every 
pebble, a chemical theory for every glow-worm, 
and a pile of science for the color of the autumn 
leaves which made way with every fleck of their 
glory. 

The trustee was right : the young man was not 
fit for a teacher. He had memorized Coccinella 
septempunctata, but he did not k)iow the ladybug. 

Among my acquaintances are three nature - 
students of this family CoccinelUdce, all of whom 
are teachers. One of these used to go into the 
woods carrying long lists of scientific names of 
flowers written out on paper, which he conned 
by the way. Along a familiar stretch of road, 
across a x^lowed field, out came the roll of names, 
and he would mumble : '^Pogonia ophioglossoides^ 
Pogonia ophioglossoides, ophioglossoideSj oxjhiog—''^ 
never seeing the waves chasing each other across 
the heavy-headed wheat. 

Of all the flowers beautiful, rare, and sweet, 
his favorite, I think, was the everlasting, for he 
said to me one day, with a show of real interest, 
'^The everlasting has the longest Latin name by 
two letters of ^wj flower I have analj^zed." 
[171] 



The second student : He never told me how it 
happened ; whether he had been reading poetry, 
had been advised by his doctor to get out-of- 
doors, or had simply found himself without a 
hobby. Anyhow, one winter night he deter- 
mined that he would study birds. He waited 
until morning, then started for Philadelphia, 
where he bought all the bird-books he could 
find. 

I shall never forget the beautiful light on his 
face as he told me the exact amount, to the cent, 
that the enormous pile of volumes cost him. 

He put the literature all away until June,— 
until things were ablare with bird-song,— then 
took himself and his library to Tuckahoe, the 
birdiest spot in New Jersey, and there began. 

This trip in June became a habit. One au- 
tumn I met him in the city. ^^How did the 
birding go last summer ? " I inquired. 

^^Slow, slow," he replied. ^^Did n't do much. 
But—^^ with an emphasis that surely meant he 
had seen the ivory-billed woodpecker or the 
great auk— "6w^ I paid expressage to Tuckahoe 
on sixty -seven pounds of bird-books ! " 

Number three is a woman, and naturally less 
[172] 



moderate than either of the men. The most 
scientific thing in this wide world is a scientific 
woman. The discoverj- of a new plant in this 
woman's out-of-doors is like the finding of a new 
pain or symptom of disease in her body. She 
hurries to the doctors to have it identified, ut- 
terly unhappy until they have told her its name. 
I have known her to travel twenty-five miles 
with a little watery, worthless mushroom in the 
hope of finding it Mycena galericulata or M. 
parabolica—ov something, it did n't matter what. 
Her opera-glasses lie focused, ready. A bird 
chirps among the trees. She snatches the glasses, 
rushes out, then rushes in, exclaiming : ''It flew 
over the garden : a streak of black— a patch of 
yellow— a short tail. A new one, I do believe ! 
It '11 make the hundred and tenth to my list." 

Once a thing is labeled, what more? She 
loves the out-of-doors, yearns over it ; yearns to 
bring things and their Latin names together. 
How she would have enjoyed Adam's place— 
having the animals file past her to get their 
names ! The joy of bending low at the approach 
of the little orange-colored bug with black spots 
on its back, and saying : ''Your name, miss? 

[173] 



Yon are Coccinella septempunctata. And you'?" 
—to lier sister laclybug — ^^You are Coccinella, 
also, but yon are novemnotataP The joy of it ! 
And something of that joy is hers, for she has a 
nature-study class at a young ladies' seminary. 

I hardly know which state of mind is farther 
from the mind of the true nature-lover— the 
ecstatic, exclamatory one, that goes chanting 
rimes and verses like priests and spring poets, 
or the analytical, labeling mind, that scours the 
country with a book, finding out what Linnaeus, 
Audubon, and Gray called things. 

Of course the lov^er of the out-of-doors wants 
to know— even know that the ladybug is Cocci- 
nella septempunctata ; but classifying the world of 
field and wood is only the beginning of know- 
ledge. How, for instance, does the fact that the 
dandelion is Taraxacum officinale compare with 
the discovery of its shining face in the cold, wet 
death of some February roadside, or the finding 
of its hoarj^ hairs in the lining of a chebec's 
nest? And to the exclamatory, all- worshiping 
ones what mean the loving lines : 

Dear common flower that grow'st beside the way, 
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, 

[1-4] 



if these worshipers never iDlucked the flower 
beside a dusty road? if they never felt May- 
time open in their hearts at sight of it? if no 
memories of 

Meadows where in sun the cattle graze, 

Where, as the breezes pass, 
The gleaming rushes lean a thousand ways, 

come to them as they pass it by? 

The true nature-lover knows at least a little^ 
and keeps learning all the time 5 he goes afield 
the seasons through ; he sees accurately, reports 
honestly, interprets humanly, and loves sin- 
cerely. 



[175] 



THE CRAZY FLICKER 




THE CRAZY FLICKER 



MR. BURROUGHS somewhere lias said that 
if ever a flicker goes crazy, he will go crazy 
boring holes. I never doubt anything Mr. Bur- 
roughs says about birds and beasts, and so for a 
good mauy years I have confidently expected 
that when I found a crazy flicker I should find 
him, as Mr. Burroughs predicted, boring holes. 

Of course I never went armed with gun or 
glass, expecting to meet a real crazy, mad-house 
flicker, though I have long been convinced that 
the whole flicker family is queer and, indeed, 
somewhat crack-brained. But there are crazy 
flickers, and at last I am able to report the cases 
[179] 



of two— two that bored holes iu barns and tin 
rain-i)ii3es, for the fiends possessed them. 

Out in the broad grain-fields near my home, a 
farmer built a large barn. It was tight, well- 
shingled, and sided with white pine-boards that 
lapped at the edges, so that not a streak of day- 
light crept in anywhere. 

It was early spring. One day shortly after 
the barn was finished, and while it was still 
empty, a flicker lighted upon the ridge-pole and 
hammered. She (I am not sure of the sex in 
either of the cases) jumped into the air at the 
first rap. How it sounded ! Never before had 
she struck anything with such a ring to it. 
What a glorious hole for a nest there must be in 
there ! Why, if the brood should happen to 
come twenty strong (which was not past hoping 
for), each young one could have a bed and a 
room all to himself— a condition of afijiirs alto- 
gether unheard of, up to this time, in flickerdom. 

Now I saw the flicker when she discovered this 
barn, and while I must say that she did not 
utter one of these exclamations, yet I do believe 
she thought them all, for she instantly set to hunt- 
ing for a good place at which to begin boring. 
[ISO] 



All of this was saue enough from the flicker 
point of view. She was not a very experienced 
bird certainly, or she would have known the 
size of the rumbling cavern beneath ; yet many 
another flicker has had to dig through in order 
to learn. 

Next to the thud of soft iMinky wood— which 
means fat grubs— the ring of hollow wood with 
a thin hard shell is most musical to a flicker's 
earSj for this is the sound of a good nesting-place. 
The flicker is very much of a family bird. 

The roof of the barn did not suit. It is not 
natural for a flicker to stand like ordinary 
beings and work j so she flew round to an end of 
the barn where she could hang on to the per- 
pendicular siding, bracing herself by her spine- 
pointed tail. Choosing a spot here at the lapping 
of two boards, she diligently began. 

I wish I could have seen the expression on 
her face and read her thoughts when she got 
through and found herself inside an empty barn. 
She must have been the most amazed and mysti- 
fied bird in the region, if she was sane enough 
to think at all. Instead of a neat, snug cavity 
sufiBcient to turn round in, she had bored into 
[181] 



an empty hay-loft. Perhaps an English sparrow 
would not have been daunted at the prospect of 
filling up a haymow with a nest, but the flicker 
was. 

Or else she was not house -hunting, as I first 
thought, but simply a demented flicker, crazy 
over holes. For now her madness showed itself. 
Out she came, hopped sidewise across a few 
boards, tapped, listened, and began a new hole. 
This, of course, opened into the same mammoth 
cave. What of it? Not where the hole opened, 
but the boring of it ; that was the thing. So, 
hopping along to another seam, she went through 
again. 

And not three times only. Day after day 
either she or the other flickers in the neighbor- 
hood kept boring away, until soon the barn be- 
came riddled with holes as if it had received a 
severe cannonading. 

It was all very interesting for the naturalist. 
The farmer, however, who had not built the barn 
for the amusement of insane birds, saw no good 
in the holes at all. 

Of like mind with the farmer were the owners 
of some fine houses in a town not far from me. 
[182] 



Here the holes were drilled into the rain-pipes. 
I did not see the insane bird this time, but a 
naturalist friend who did reported it a male 
that had gone mad with love. 

The bird came back early in the spring, and 
announced himself by beating a thunderous 
tattoo on a galvanized iron chimney. The per- 
sons in the rooms below jumped as if the roof 
were falling. The passers-by on the street 
halted to gaze around in wonder. There was 
nothing to be seen. Again the rattling, ringing 
roll, and up out of the chimney popped the 
flicker, in an ecstasy over his new drum— his 
^'Spanish guitar," for he was certainly calling a 
mate, though not another flicker had yet re- 
turned. 

Then across the way, on the top of a neighbor- 
ing house, he spied another, larger drum, and gal- 
loped over there. It was a big ventilator. He 
hit it, and it boomed. Catching his toes around 
an iron hoop that circled it, he began to beat a 
roll to wake the very dead. 

The mystery is that his bill did not fly into 
splinters. But it did not. The sound, however, 
went to his head. He got stark mad with the 
[183] 



noise, crazier and crazier over galvanized iron, 
until he went to boring holes into the rain-pipe. 

At the first it was love, doubtless, that ailed 
him ; he was drumming up a bride. But that 
his tender passion soon changed to an insane 
delight in his own wonderful self is very evident. 
He grew enamoured of his drumming. Nor is he 
the first male bird I have known thus in love. 
Iq the island park at Detroit, Michigan, I knew 
a red-headed woodpecker to serenade himself 
long after the mating season — up, in fact, to 
September, the time I left the park woods. He 
would get inside the zinc ventilator of the club- 
house and make the island ring. 

It was several days after his arrival before this 
second crazy flicker attacked the rain-pipes. Up 
to that time the observers in the neighborhood 
had looked upon him as a harmless, ardent lover 
who could not express half his feeling upon an 
ordinary rotten stub, and so had taken to the 
hollow-sounding chimneys. They were amused. 

Suddenly that all changed. They had wakened 

to the fact that the bird was a raving maniac ', 

for what did they see one morning but the 

flicker high up under the corner of the roof, 

[184] 



clutching a small iron bracket in the side of the 
house^ and drilling a hole through the rain-pipe ! 

He was hammering like a tinsmith, and already, 
when discovered, had cut a hole half as big as 
one's fist. He had not tried to drill before ; he 
had been happy with the sound. Something, 
however, either the size, shape, or ring of the 
pipe, suggested ^^holes" to his wild wits, and 
right through the pipe he had gone. 

It was not grubs that he was after. Maybe 
somewhere in his mad head was the remote 
notion of a nest. Where, however, could he 
have found a mate as crazy as himself — crazy 
enough to have built in such a place ^ Young 
Mrs. Flicker is an exceedingly spoony bride ; 
love in a cottage is just to her liking ; but I 
have yet to see one who would go to the length 
of a rain-pipe. 

The crazy bird was finally scared away, leaving 
several indignant citizens behind, who heartily 
wished they had taken the law into their hands 
and slain him as a menace to the common- 
wealth. 



[185] 



SOME FKIENDLY BIRDS 




SOME FRIENDLY BIRDS 



TTy^E have all heard the pack chanting : 

* " Now this is the law of the jungle — as old and 

as true as the sky ; 
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the 

Wolf that shall break it must die. 
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law 

runneth forward and back — 
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the 

strength of the Wolf is the Pack. 

We have seen the law at work in herd and 
drove, in school and flock, and everywhere it is 
the great law of necessity— obey or die. It 
obtains among men as well as among beasts and 
birds. Bnt the man-pack has broken, because 
we are no longer mere wolves, and a higher law 
[189] 



obtains. We have scattered as a pack and re- 
formed as a community— a friendly mingling of 
pack and herd and school and flock. 

Nothing like this has happened to any great 
extent among the birds and beasts, for the new 
earth has not yet come ; but many interesting 
individual friendships have been recorded, to 
which every close observer of the out-of-doors 
can add a few. 

Allowance must always be made for false 
seeing and the temperament of the observer. 
One's interpretations are matters of nature and 
—of constitution sometimes. The facts I must 
see with the eyes of my neighbor ; the meaning 
of the facts I can see with no one's eyes but my 
own. The following observations I belicA^e are 
just as you would have made them ; their inter- 
pretation is my own and may not agree with 
yours at all. 

One of my friends, a keen and trustworthy 
naturalist, found recently that a pair of cat- 
birds were building a nest in the thick tangle of 
vines just outside her dining-room window. 
She soon noticed that the pair of robins who 
had eggs in a neighboring apple-tree showed 
[190] 



extraordinary interest in the work of the cat- 
birds. The conduct of the robins was very un- 
usual, and the woman began to watch. 

Evidently, according to robin standards, some- 
thing about the new nest was wrong, something 
that ought to be changed over robinwise. The 
catbirds were not building just right. They were 
a young couple, doubtless ; this was their first nest, 
and the robins, who had built scores of nests, 
looked on critically, compassionately, and with a 
desire to advise that was almost killing them. 

The work went on for a day or two. Then it 
chanced that both catbirds flew off together for 
more building- material. The robins were watch- 
ing. They could hold out no longer. Taking a 
hasty look around to make sure that their young 
neighbors were quite gone, one of the robins (the 
woman in the window was too astonished to note 
which) dropped to the ground, picked up a piece 
of coarse grass, and hurried to the half-finished 
nest. Stepping quickly in, she (it must have 
been ^'she ") laid the straw along the rim of the 
clumsy nest, and, cuddling down inside, drew the 
ragged walls up to her round, shapely breast to 
mold them into something like form. 
[191] 



It is almost too human a story to be true. 
But I believe it to be true, though I never saw 
anything among the birds quite equal to it. 

The catbirds soon returned with some fine 
rootlets, and did not seem to notice a robin, with 
head cocked, eying them from a corner of the 
grape-arbor. 

If this was not a manifestation of friendship, 
it surely was of good will— the kind of good will, 
I must admit, that among us humans is not 
always appreciated. 

One can hardly imagine such a thing as mutual 
benefit, to say nothing of friendship, in the com- 
mon home life of fish-hawks, crow-blackbirds, 
and English sparrows. The blackbirds and 
hawks might get on together, but what saint 
among the birds could live with an English 
sparrow— could be friendlj^ with him? Yet the 
fish-hawks' nest along the Delaware Bay which 
I have spoken of in a previous chapter harbors, 
besides the hawks, a small community of crow- 
blackbirds and (at my last visit) two families of 
English sparrows. 

This huge nest, planted firmly upon the very 
tox) of a tall oak, standing almost alone on the 
[192] 



edge of a vast salt-marsh, is not the natural nest- 
ing-place for blackbirds and sparrows. This 
marsh -land is the range of the hawks. They are 
at home here. The blackbirds and sparrows, for 
some reason, have broken away from the inland. 
The blackbirds have nested here, to my know- 
ledge, for thirteen years 5 the sparrows discovered 
the great nest only a year ago. 

The walls of the nest are as big around as a 
hogshead and as rough as the protruding ends of 
corn-stalks, dead limbs, and small cord- wood can 
make them. It is around in the crevices of these 
uneven walls that the blackbirds and sparrows 
lodge their nests. 

I am by no means certain that all is harmoni- 
ous in this queer colony. There was no appear- 
ance of discord— none but the appearance of the 
sparrows. Neither am I sure why these small 
birds choose to live thus with the hawks. They 
are both independent birds, not hangers-on at all -, 
so it cannot be the mere convenience of a ready- 
made nesting-site. That could be had anywhere ; 
besides, naturally, neither grackles nor sparrows 
would fly far away into a marsh in looking for 
a place to build. It cannot be that they come 
13 [193] 



for tlie bits of fish left after tlie young hawks 
have eaten. They are not particularly fond of 
fish, and there would not be crumbs enough to 
make their coming worth while^ anyway. 

I believe the blackbirds are like certain strange 
persons : they enjoy living in a tenement. There 
are extraordinary neighborhood advantages in a 
big, round hawk's nest— fine chances for company 
and gossip. The sparrows found the grackles 
living here and saw a fine chance to intrude. 

But this is not generous nor even fair. Is it 
not just as easy and as safe to put it all on the 
score of friendly interest and good-fellowship? 
I can believe that tlie hawks enjoy the cheerful 
clatter of the garrulous crow-blacks and the 
small impertinence of tlie sparrows. On the 
other hand, the crow-blacks and sparrows feel a 
certain protection in the presence of the hawks, 
and may, who knows, appreciate the friendship 
of such high and mighty folk. 

Quite as interesting and unusual a show of 
friendship, at least of friendliness, was seen re- 
cently by bird-lovers on a telephone-pole in a 
thickly settled town not far from Boston. 

There were poles in plenty sticking up all 
[194] 



over the surrounding country ; but passing by 
all of these, a pair of flickers, a pair of chick- 
adees, and a pair of red-headed woodpeckers 
(erytkrocephalus) selected the same pole for 
their nests, prepared their holes, hatched and 
brought up their large, noisy families together, 
without a single quarrel so far as the curious 
public knew. And they did all this with per- 
sons coming from far and near to stare at them 
through opera-glasses, for the red-headed wood- 
peckers were the only pair with such heads re- 
ported that season anywhere around. 

Some day the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, 
which, of course, is much more of a wonder than 
the kingbird's dwelling i^eaceably with the or- 
chard-oriole. But this, in its way, is no mean 
wonder. 

I was rowing up a little creek one day when 
I found a kingbird's nest in the low, drooping 
branch of a red maple, swinging within three 
feet of the water. The moment the kingbirds 
saw me back water they knew I had discovered 
their nest, and across the creek they started on 
the four maddest wings. How they quivered ! 
The kingbirds never seem exactly placid ; but 
[195] 



let Mrs. Kingbird catch yon fooliug around her 
nest ! 

However, it was here in the maple that day 
that I had a fresh glimpse into the heart of this 
little-loved bird. He is not so quarrelsome and 
ill-natured under his feathers as he appears. He 
is splintery, but neighborly withal. 

While I was holding to his nest-bough, the 
skiff swung in and wedged its nose between the 
forks of another limb that dragged the water. 
Turning to get free, I put my hand fairly upon a 
second nest— the dainty cradle of an orchard- 
oriole. The two nests were not five feet apart. 

Kingbird and oriole friendly? It is hard to 
imagine two birds with respectable bird ways so 
ill assorted for neighbors as these two. Kather 
is it hard to think of kingbirds living in peace 
anywhere or with anybody. 

The difference in the natures of the two birds 
was strikingly exhibited in the style of these 
two nests. The kingbird has n't a particle of 
imagination, not an atom of the artistic in his 
soul. His shape, dress, and voice declare it. He 
is hard-headed, straightforward, and serious, 
somewhat overbearing, perhaps, and testy, but 
[196] 



businesslike and refined in all his tastes. His 
nest is himself over again : strong^ plain, ade- 
quate, but, like its builder, refined. Contrast 
the oriole's. Eomance, poetry, and that inde- 
scribable touch— the light, easy, negligent touch 
of the artist— in every line of it. Why, the 
thing was actually woven of new-mown hay— 
as if one should build his house of sandalwood— 
with all the scent of the hay-field about it. I 
put my nose near and took a deep, delicious 
breath. 

The birds had selected and cut the grass 
themselves and worked it in while green. Some 
of it was still uncured, still soft and sweet with 
sap. One side, exposed to the sun through a 
leaf rift, had gone a golden yellow ; but the 
other side, deeply shaded the day through, was 
yet green and making more slowly under the 
leaves. And this nest was woven, not built up 
like the kingbird's ; it was hung, not saddled 
upon the limb— suspended from the slenderest 
of forks, so that every little breeze would rock 
it. And so loosely woven, so deftly, slightly 
tied ! 

There must have been a friendly understand- 
[197] 



ing between the two birds. If kingbird were 
as ugly a neighbor as some that my friends have 
heard of, the oriole could not have had the 
heart to perch upon that maple's top— the com- 
mon front step to their double house— and sing 
down into his own and the kingbird's home. 
Yet J up there that moment he sat, utterly care- 
free, abandoned to happiness, the great maple- 
tree adrip with his limpid, liquid song. 

A state of things farther removed from a 
chronic neighborhood quarrel, more like genu- 
ine friendship, it would be hard anywhere to 
find. One may certainly be allowed to believe 
in a friendly agreement between the two birds, 
to wit : that oriole provide music for the two 
families, while kingbird guard the premises. 
Whether the agreement was formally come to 
or not (and of course it was not), this is exactly 
what was doing, the fighting for both being at- 
tended to by the cantankerous kingbird, and 
the oriole furnishing all the song. 



[198] 



"THE LONGEST WAY ROUND" 




THE LONGEST WAY ROUND" 



FROSTY weather and ripe persimmons had 
come^ with Thanksgiving close at hand. 
Uncle Jethro and I were husking corn. 

^'What had you rather have for Thanksgiv- 
ing, Uncle Jeth/' I asked, ^^one of Horner's big 
bronze gobblers or a nice young gander?" 

The old darky paused, dropped his ear of 
corn from a paralyzed hand, and looked me over 
with annihilating scorn. 

'^Gobbler ! gander ! Dat— dat w'at I calls de 
las' ac'. Dat am de egregiousest misappreciation 
of circumstance an' de proprieties w'at 's oc- 
curred to my personal cognition, sure ! Dar am 
[201] 



jes one time iu de yliear fer no ndder kin' of 
meat but possum, an' dat time, boy, am de time 
ter gib thanks." 

Though not exactly sure of the precise mean- 
ing of Uncle Jethro's words, I was duly apolo- 
getic, and instant with my promise to bring 
forth a big, fat possum for his Thanksgiving 
dinner. 

AVe had finished the shock and I had gone 
ahead, broken the binding on the next one and 
pushed it over, while Uncle Jethro was kicking 
the stray ears into the pile. 

As the stalks tumbled I looked down to see 
the mice run, when, to my astonishment, I saw, 
curled up in a bed of corn -blades, an enormous 
possum. He had taken the shock of stalks for 
his winter home, and made his nest at its very 
center, snug and warm and weather-proof. 

He half uncurled, yawned, and blinked as the 
glaring light burst upon him, but showed no 
sign of surprise nor evinced the least intention 
of getting up. It was very inconvenient, dis- 
tressing indeed, to have one's house pulled down 
like this. AVould n't I be gentleman enough to 
spare him his bed? 

[202] 



''Uncle Jeth !" I called, as calmly as I knew 
how. "Uncle Jeth, would you mind if I brought 
you that possum to-day?" 

'^Mind, chir, mind?" he chuckled. "OP 
Jethro shuttin' his doo' on Br'er Possum? Fetch 
him wp, honey, fetch him up. Jethro gwine 
take him in." 

"Well, how will this one do!" I exclaimed, 
catching the possum with a quick grab by the 
tail and lifting him up fairly under the old man's 
nose. 

"De golden chariot am a-comin' ! " gasped 
Uncle Jethro, jumping back, his unbelieving 
eyes bulging half out of his head. "Wat dat, 
yo' chil', yo' ! Possum ! De quails an' de 
manna an' de water in de rock ! Yo' 's de beat- 
enes', yo' is. Yo' 's done been talkin' wid ol' 
Miss Owl las' night, dat w'at yo' has." 

But I stoutly denied this imputation. I had 
not been hunting the night before and hidden 
the possum here in order to surprise Uncle 
Jethro, as he saw immediately on examining 
the creature's bed. 

The great fat fellow had slept in that bed 
more than one night, more than a mouth of 
[ 203 ] 



nights, in all probability. And here the shock 
stood within a quarter of a mile of the house, and 
directly along our beaten path to the woods. 
Fifty times, at least, the dog had passed this 
shock, had run round it, had sniffed at it, doubt- 
less, and gOQC on, while the possum slept peace- 
fully inside. 

How? 

Who knows the hows of possum ways'? All 
that Uncle Jethro himself is sure of with re- 
gard to possum is that by Thanksgiving-time 
there is nothing in the market to approach it 
for a roast. You can trust Uncle Jethro's ob- 
servations on this point. 

But how did the possum succeed in establishing 
himself along the path and so near the house, 
where, except for this accident to his shock, 
which the longest-headed possum could not have 
foreseen, he might have lived indefinitely? 
How ? In this way, partly : This corn-shock that 
he had chosen was peculiar. Unlike any other 
in the field, it stood close along an old worm- 
fence and in such a position that one of the long 
cross-stakes used for a post slanted out over its 
top. 

[204] 



Now a rabbit cannot walk the top rail of a 
fence, nor climb out to the tip of a tall slanting 
pole. But a possum can. A rabbit would have 
to creep under the shock from the bottom, going 
in on the ground. A i)0ssum, however, Avould 
not have to do that way. He could walk the 
fence, climb out on the slanting stake, drop to 
the top of the shock, and go straight down 
through the middle. 

And that is exactly what this possum did. He 
came out the way he went in, too, never leaving 
his track on the ground near the nest, nor his 
scent where a dog could find it. He may not 
have known that dogs cannot walk fences and 
climb poles. Perhaps not. But he knew two 
things, stupid as he looked : one was that a good 
and sure road home lay atop the rail fence ; the 
other, that a pretty safe way to hang out his 
latch-string was through the chimney. 

Yet perhaps this was only a cunning blunder, 
and not real woods-wisdom at all ; for it is 
difficult to believe in the mentality of so much 
fat and a chronic smile. One is not surprised at 
a coon's taking '^the longest way round" — the 
way of the top rail ; but that a sleepy, logy 
[205] 



possum should discover it to be '^the surest way 
home " comes as a real surprise. 

I am inclined to think it was a blunder. He 
happened to walk the fence, climb the stake, and 
tumble off into a soft spot. And if once, why 
not again ! For let a notion get into a possum's 
head, and there it will stick. You can't get it 
out, nor get another one in ; there is n't room. 

As an illustration take the case of ^' Pinky," a 
little possum we once possessed, who had a notion 
that he wanted to be domesticated. 

Most wild animals stoutly resist all of our well- 
intentioned efforts to bring them up in dooryard 
waySj and take to the woods again at the first 
opportunity. I have tried one after another, but 
every one of them sooner or later has escaped to 
the wilds — every one but Pinky. He refused 
to stay in the woods even when taken back there, 
because, forsooth, into the little think-hole in his 
head had got stuck the notion that he wanted to 
be a domesticated possum, and that notion could 
not be budged. 

Pinky was one of a family of nine that I caught 
several springs ago and carried home. In the 
course of a few weeks eight of them were adopted 
[206] 



by admiriug fiieiids ; but Pinky^ because lie was 
the runt and looked very sorry and forlorn, was 
not chosen. He was left with me. I kept him, — 
his mother had choked to death on a fish-bone, — 
and fed him milk until he caught ujy to the size 
of the biggest mother-fed possum of his age in 
the woods. Then I took him down to the old 
stump in the brier-patch where he was born, and 
left him to shift for himself. 

Being thrown into a brier-patch was exactly 
what tickled Br'er Rabbit half to death ; and 
any one would have supposed that being put 
gently down in his home brier-patch would have 
tickled this little possum even more. 

Not he ! I went home and forgot him. But 
the next morning, when breakfast was preparing, 
whom should we see but Pinky, curled up in the 
feather cushion of the kitchen settee, sound 
asleep. 

He had found his way back during the night, 
had climbed in through the trough of the pump- 
box, and had gone to sleep like the rest of the 
family. He gaped and grinned and looked about 
him when awakened, altogether at home, and 
really surprised that morning had come so soon. 
[207] 



He got down and took his saucer of milk under 
the stove as if nothing unusual had happened. 

We had had a good many possums^ crows, 
lizards, and the like ; so, in spite of this winsome 
show of confidence and affection, Pinky was 
borne away once more to the briers. 

That night he did not creep in by the pump- 
box trough. Nothing was seen of him, and he 
passed quickly out of our minds. But he still 
kept his notion. Two or three days after this, 
as I was crossing the back yard, I stopped to pick 
up a large calabash -gourd that I had left on the 
woodpile. I had cut a round hole in the gourd 
somewhat larger than a silver dollar, intending to 
fasten the thing up for the bluebirds to nest in. 

It ought to have been as light as so much air, 
almost, but instead it was heavy— the children 
had filled it with sand, no doubt. I turned it 
over and looked into the hole, and lo ! not sand, 
but Pinky ! 

The notion had brought him back again. 
How he ever managed to squeeze through the 
opening, I don't know 5 but there he was, sleep- 
ing away as soundly as ever. 

He no longer possessed the notion ; the notion 
[208] 



possessed him. And what happened finally? 
A sad thing, of course. A creature with such a 
head on his shoulders could not come to a fine 
and happy end. 

I took Pinky back to the woods the third 
time, and the third time he returned, but blun- 
dered into a neighbor's yard, and— and a little 
later he was drawn up in a bucket of water from 
the bottom of that neighbor's well, still asleep, 
only— they could not wake him up. 

It is not easy to reconcile such wit as this 
with the cunning of the fence-rail road and the 
chimney entrance. Yet this one of the corn- 
shock is not the only possum I have known to 
take a roundabout way home for the sake of 
hiding his trail. One autumn I was fooled over 
and over,— ire were fooled, the dog and I,— 
until snow fell and the whole trick was written 
out in signs that our stumbling wits had to 
understand. 

Around the rim of the steep wooded hillsides 
circling Lupton's Pond runs a rail fence, along 
which grow a number of old chestnut-oak trees 
with clusters of great stems from single spread- 
ing stumps that are particularly gone to holes. 
14 [200] 



Ordinaril} , if one wanted a possum, about all 
he had to do was to climb the hill, prod around 
in the holes until he felt something soft that 
hissed, then reach in and pull the possum out. 

This fall they had all been pulled out. One 
day five came forth from a single stump, which 
seemed to exhaust the hillside's crop for that 
year, so that I quite ceased looking into the 
stumps for more. 

Several times the dog had started a trail in 
the woods at the head of the pond, gone up the 
hill to the crest, and halted, beating about, 
fooled. What was it^ At first I took it to be 
a coon ; for there is no other creature in our 
woods so thoughtful of his steps. One whose 
range is infested with dogs develops astonishing 
care and cunning. 

An old coon in such a country will never go 
straight home, nor take a beaten path. Out on 
the boundaries of his range he trots along with- 
out minding how he steps. The dogs may have 
fun with his trail here. He intends only that they 
shall not follow him clear home, that they shall 
not find his home-tree, nor even the vicinity of it. 

So, as he enters his own neighborhood swamp 
[210] 



his movements change. The dogs may be hard 
after him or not. If not close behind, he knows 
by long experience that they may be expected, 
and never so far forgets his precious skin as to 
leave a clue pointing toward home. 

Instead he trots along a boundary fence, or 
up the swamp stream, leaping all the crossing 
logs, and coming out, likely, on the bank away 
from the nest-tree. Farther down he jumps 
the stream, runs hard toward a big gum, and 
from a dozen feet away takes a flying leap, 
catching the trunk up just out of reach of the 
keen-nosed dogs. On uj) he goes a little and 
leaps again, touching the ground ten feet out, 
thus leaving a gap, a blank, of twenty or more 
feet in his trail. 

The stream or fence has puzzled the dogs ; but 
now they begin to worry. They circle and 
finally pick up the scent beyond the first gap, 
only to run instantly into a greater blank, one 
that the widest circling does not cross. For the 
coon has taken to another tree ; out on the limbs 
of this to still another, and on, like a squirrel, 
from tree to tree for perhaps a hundred yards, on, 
it may be, to his own high hollow. 
[211] 



It was such a broken trail that I thought the 
dog must be running. She could get no farther 
than the top of the slope. Over the fence, under 
it, and out far and wide she would go, but never 
a sniff of the lost scent. 

Then came a light snow, and on the white 
page of the hillside in his own hand was written 
the story of a large possum, who had been along 
the stream at the head of the pond, had gone 
up the hill to a fallen pine, out along this by 
way of the thick top to the fence-post, and down 
the rails. 

The writing was plain in the sticky snow, and 
so was the mystery of the broken trail. I hur- 
ried along the fence and saw ahead that a sag- 
ging post leaned in against one of the large 
chestnut-oaks. Instinctively I knew that my 
possum was in that tree. 

Sure enough, the snow was brushed from the 
post ; there were signs on the trunk, and down 
between the twin boles was the hole, smooth, 
clean, and possumy. The crafty old fellow had 
squeezed hard to get in and had left a hair or 
two on the rim of his entrance. 

[212] 



^^ONE FLEW. EAST AND ONE FLEW 
WEST " 



s^t 



'^^ 



"ONE FLEW EAST AND ONE FLEW 

WEST" 

EAELY dusk of a cold March night was fall- 
ing. The two red maples in the little 
alder swale beyond the pasture stood penciled 
on the gray sky. A robin had been singing ; but 
now the deep winter hush had crept back over 
the fields. 

Suddenly there was a hiss and winnow of 
wings close above my head. I dodged. Past 
me, lined for the swale, with an erratic, rotary 
fl.ight as if fired from a rifle, sped a bird. 

'^He'sback!" I exclaimed. "He escaped!" 
And through my cold, rain-soaked world of wood 
[215] 



and field and swale shot a new, wild thrill of 
life. It was the return of a woodcock that had 
nested for several seasons along a slender, alder- 
hidden stream about half a mile from my home. 

I was not expecting him back this spring. 
When the gunning season opened the previous 
July, at least a score of men knew that a single 
X)air of woodcocks had nested in the swale ; and 
up and down, over and over, one after another 
they beat it, beat it by clump, by tussock, by 
square foot for the birds, killing five. Four of 
these were the young of that summer ; the fifth 
was one of the parents. 

The swale turned brown, and soon lay silent 
and bleak. I could not pass it during the win- 
ter without a feeling akin to anger. It was a 
narrow strip, barely fifty feet across at its 
widest, flanked by a wooded hillside and by 
wide, tilled fields. But it was all the swamp, 
all the meadow I had ; and that this should be 
robbed of its life, that all my out-of-doors within 
vision range should never again hold a wood- 
cock's nest, was more than a grief. 

I had been robbed. Twenty men against six 
woodcocks ! And they had been eager to kill 
[216] 



the last i^air breeding in this last shrinking 
covert. 

They had been eager— but one of the pair, by 
some miracle, had escaped. There he went 
humming through the dusk, and all my world 
was changed. 

He would induce some young, unmated female 
on her way north to remain with him, and there 
would yet be a home in the swale. At first I 
feared lest this one should prove to be a female 
that would be lured away 5 if not, then that he 
might be a migrant himself, who would halt 
only to feed that night. But the next day I 
found him along the stream, and I knew by 
the way he got to cover that he was on familiar 
ground and had come to stay. 

What a queer, comical-looking bird he is ! If 
nature ever had any feeble-minded offspring, 
you would surely put Woodcock down for one. 
But he has a full share of bird sense. The 
matter with him is partly his nocturnal habits. 
Night does not seem the birds' natural wake- 
time, and those that turn it into day invariably 
take on some odd, almost abnormal appearance 
— the owl assumes his ridiculous show of wis- 
[217] 



dom, and the woodcock wears a vacuous ex- 
pression that is positively imbecile. 

Yet it is neither imbecility nor wisdom, but 
merely beaks and eyes. With eyes to the front 
and a beak made for spectacles, the owl looks 
very professorial. The woodcock's eyes are 
at the rear and in the top of his head. If he 
wore glasses, they would rest on the back of his 
neck. 

This position for the bird's eyes, however, is 
a convenient one. He literally needs to see out 
of the top of his head a part of the time. His 
only food is angleworms, for the catching of 
which nature provides him a three-inch probe 
of a bill. Then, for his safety and comfort when 
sounding for the worms, in order to keep his 
eyes out of the mire, she puts them up on the 
top of his head, just as a clam-digger rolls up 
his sleeves when at his task in the mud. 

Nature is preeminently practical, even at the 
cost of appearance, as the eyes of the woodcock 
attest. And she has done another practical 
thing for this freak child which adds to his 
oddity and interest— this time in connection 
with his beak. 

[218] 



In the bare, damp spots among the alders and 
along the edge of the corn-field, soon after 
Woodcock arrived, I fonnd his borings— gronj^s 
of a dozen or more holes where, in hunting 
worms, he had plunged his bill into the earth up 
to his eyes (up to the place where his eyes 
would normally have been). I had always won- 
dered how the bird, when he felt a worm, could 
open his bill with it forced to the hilt in stiff, solid 
earth, for surely he does not thrust it down 
already open. Year after year I kept on won- 
dering instead of investigating, until one day a 
man showed me that there was a curious flexible 
tip to the upper mandible which the bird could 
move independently of the rest of the beak, and 
thus grasp the luckless worm, though deep in 
the mud. 

This is distinction enough for one beak, and 
we ought not to expect of it a song. Nor do 
we. One cannot think of a hooked beak or a 
flat beak or a long beak emitting music. It is 
not for his singing that I should miss Woodcock 
in the swale, but for his dancing. No festival 
fires among the tepees, no barbecue among the 
cabins, ever saw wilder, more frenzied dancing 
[219] 



than the alders witness night after night in early 
spring. 

And if the woodcock does not sing, he harps 
his own accompaniment— a weird wing music, 
half seolian, that sets you dancing, too, as no 
other bird music you ever heard. 

It is dusk in the swale. I am sitting on the 
root of one of the red maples, now in misty 
garnet bloom. A wavering line of piping hylas 
marks the course of the stream. Scattered bird- 
calls come from the covert, and out of the deep- 
ening blue overhead falls a flock of notes, the 
cJiinJtS of migrants winging north. 

Presently, in the grassy level across the stream, 
sounds a clear peent ! lyeent I peent ! I listen, 
half rising. Peent ! peent ! peent ! slow and 
regular ; then, bursting from cover with the 
rush of a rocket, spins the woodcock. Out against 
the gray horizon he sweeps, and round on the 
first turn of his soaring spiral. The hum of his 
wings fills the swale. Round and round, swifter 
and swifter, the hum rising shrill as he mounts 
two hundred— three hundred— four hundred feet 
into the dusky sky, and hangs— hangs a whirling 
blur on the blue, and drops— headlong, with a 
[220] 



pitching, zigzag flight and the velocity of a 
bullet, whistling, as he falls, a low, pearly trill of 
love that smothers in the whir of his alighting 
wings. 

It is all over, and I am standing, my held 
breath coming in gasps. Then there sounds 
again that measured, preparatory ])eent ! peent ! 
and I await the second burst, the looping spiral 
flight, the drop, and the clear, low whistle of 
love. And so the dance goes on as the darkness 
thickens, until only a winnow whirls shrill 
toward the stars, and a sweet, pearly whistle 
ripples down through the gloom. 

While waiting there in the twilight I saw the 
last year's nest of a wood-thrush in the leafless 
top of a slender sapling. I had not heard Wood- 
thrush yet this spring. What if he should not 
return to the strip of alder-bottom'? Happily 
there is no immediate danger. Yet I should 
miss the wild love-dance of my woodcock almost 
as much as I should the serene love -song of the 
thrush. I should miss the personality of my 
woodcock even more. He is so elusive, so unex- 
pected, so suggestive of bog and stream. There 
is a thrill in his break from cover like the thrill 
[221] 



one feels in the strike and whirl of a trout. 
Fifty thrushes would fifty times sweeten the 
swale ] my single pair of woodcocks would keep 
it all wild and untamed. 

But they are gone. Like all birds, the wood- 
cocks have many natural enemies ; they are one 
of their own worst enemies in building so early 
that snows and frosts destroy the eggs, and in 
places where April freshets sweep them away. 
Yet in spite of all this, they would flourish were 
it not for the pot-hunter. They could be hunted 
during the weeks of the fall migration, as the 
IN'ew England States allow, and still flourish. 
But in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, 
Maryland, and several other States they are 
shot in July, almost before the young are on the 
wing. And in the Southern States, excepting 
South Carolina and Alabama, no protection is 
afforded them whatever. Here from the North 
they congregate during the winter, and here all 
winter long they are slaughtered and shipjjed 
back to the North — to the States that are trying 
to save them. 

From everj^where over their wide range, 
between the Atlantic coast and the line of the 
[222] 



Mississippi River, the woodcocks are disappear- 
ing. Once gone, they can hardly l)e restored, 
largely because of their peculiar food, which 
makes them migratory, and which cannot he 
supplied them as grain can be supplied to the 
quail and to other game-birds. The dangers of 
their migrations and those which beset their 
nesting-places, the fewness of their eggs, their 
limited and easily hunted coverts, are causes 
which are making rapidly toward the extinction 
of the woodcocks, and which would greatly add 
to the difficulty of their restoration. 

Already these noble birds have gone from the 
swale. There has been no love-dance over the 
alders since those of my woodcock many springs 
ago. The trees have been swept from the hill- 
side, the little stream has shrunken, and rush and 
sedge are now cropped close by the cattle. But 
the birds were not driven away. 

They were shot. 

The night that my woodcock whizzed past on 
his spring return to the swale, another bird 
sailed low over the yard on his way back from 
the swale. But his passing had lately become a 
nightly occurrence. It was little Aix, a tame 
[223] 



wood-duckj belonging to tlie boys of my nearest 
neighbor. 

Little Aix, too, has a story, which is more 
than his own in j)articular, for it is the story of 
all the wood-ducks, just as the story of the 
woodcock in the swale is that of the woodcocks 
everywhere. 

The wood-ducks are vanishing. Where a 
score of years ago they were i^lentiful, to-day 
they are almost unknown. And this is largely 
because of the utter lack of protection in many 
of the States, but more largely because only seven 
of the States and three of the Canadian provinces 
close the gunning season early enough in the 
winter to prevent spring shooting on the breed- 
ing-grounds. It is a sad comment that we have 
neither humaneness nor sportsmanlike spirit 
enough to let the birds alone during the mating- 
and nesting-time. 

Among all our native game-birds there is no 
other so beautiful as the wood-duck, and his sad 
history is partly the history of his beauty. In 
rhyme and story, since story-telling began, we 
have seen how perilous a gift beauty is, and now 
we see it even in the woods. It is proving fatal 
[224] 



to the wood-duck. He is so graceful^ so beautiful 
in dress, tliat when auy other duck would be 
passed by, he is shot, in season and out, just to 
be looked at, taken home, and stuffed. 

His gracious, confiding nature and his peculiar 
breeding-haunts have also to do with his threat- 
ened extinction. Unlike the others of his fam- 
ily (except in rare instances the goldeneye), the 
wood- duck builds in hollow trees along wood- 
land streams and small grassy ponds. He does 
not seek the marshes, the open shore, or the wild, 
far-northern lakes. There is something in the 
society of man that attracts him. Except in 
the wide, treeless plains and in the heart of the 
Eocky Mountains, he is found scattered every- 
where between Mexico and Hudson Bay ; and 
over all this wide range he breeds, being in 
many localities the only duck to remain through 
the summer, and hence his common name of 
'' summer duck." He is naturally of a retiring 
disposition, but not suspicious or shy. Being 
thus, a woods bird and easily approached, he 
falls a frequent and an easy victim. 

He is an interesting and peculiar duck. He 
eats acorns ; he is even called the ^' acorn-duck." 
15 [225] 



If beechnuts or chestnuts are at hand, they will 
do as well as acorns. He is fond of chicken- 
grapes, insects, and seeds, too. 

But what is even more unusual is the wood- 
duck's nesting-place. A duck's nest ? Down in 
the soft, damp moss, on a bit of an island, or 
hidden in the high grass along some wild lake- 
side. Kot so. The wood-duck builds in a hol- 
low tree, high and dry, and even a long way 
from water, it may be. 

The wood-duck's young, of course, are like all 
ducklings, with feet and bills bigger than their 
wings. They cannot i^ossibly remain in the tree- 
hollow until old enough to fly. How do they 
get down to the water? Usually they scramble 
down head over heels ; sometimes, it is said, the 
mother carries them, and if so, then her solution 
of this problem is one of the tenderest passages 
in all the bird life of the woods. But I have 
never seen it. I had hoped to see it the spring 
that little Aix, the tame wood-duck of my 
neighbor, was an egg,— hoped to see the mother 
carry each fat, downy duckling to the ground, 
dangling from her beak by its little flipper, 
then, with her brood all safely landed, lead them 
[226] 



together to the water and launch them,— but 
something happened. 

And this happening concerns little Aix in 
particular, and this is now his story only. 

I had known little Aix since egghood. I 
knew his parents before him. Where Silver 
Run grows darkly silent and glides into the open 
pond, there still leans the great maple stub 
from the hollow top of which little Aix and 
eleven others, in their buff-white shells, were 
taken and carried away to my neighbor's farm 
to be hatched. 

A sweeter, wilder home never was than this 
along the run. A world of lake and' swampy 
wood lies all around. Moss-grown oaks and 
maples shadow the cedar-scented stream which 
slips directly beneath the broken stub and 
widens — first among a hundred tiny islands, 
then into the quiet, unbroken surface of the 
pond. 

More than once I have pushed softly into the 
run, led by one of the wood-ducks. Stemming 
ahead of the skiff, with a grace that would make 
me forget the charm of his exquisite dress, he 
would quietly lead me to the bend beyond the 
[ 227 ] 



stub aucl go ashore, lost instantly in the thick 
swamp tangle. 

Or I would slip up and catch him half asleep, 
when he should have been very wide awake, 
for the one in the stub could not see out, and 
he was on guard. Oe-eek! Oe-eek! he would 
whistle low in alarm. Then, recognizing me, he 
would calmly watch while I edged past. Or I 
would come up and find no one about. I would 
tap. There in the splintered top she would 
stand, interested, but not disturbed, and with a 
look of trust in her eyes that I never could 
betray. 

Little Aix was the only one of the brood to 
survive his motherless ducklinghood. But he 
throve in the barn yard, and came through the 
winter to perfect and beautiful maturity. Up 
to this time he had been content in the barn- 
yard babel, but now a change came over him. 
Ever since the first February wedge of wild 
geese had passed honking through the skies, he 
had been restless, and had fallen more and more 
into the habit of flying over to the swale, where 
he stayed until dusk. 

He was dressed for a wedding, but his bride 
[228] 



was not among the big, overgrown ducks of tlie 
yard. He sought her in the swale. Day after 
day he sought her, but she was not there. He 
waited for her coming. Others came. Line 
after line beat northward, high overhead, and 
he called 5 but they fanned on— they were 
scooters or mallards or goosanders. 

Little Aix had not been taken in the autumn 
on the long south journey by his mother, where 
he might have found a bride. But then, his 
mother did not make the journey that fall. 
The day that her eggs were stolen she was shot 
from the top of the stub, and her world— and 
mine— of lake and wood was robbed. 

I still can see her, if I wish, and her mate beside 
her, wired to a board in a glass case. But I had 
rather push quietly into the run and remember 
them as they were alive here. 

The spot is still wild and sweet, but the charm 
of its life is gone. I hoped little Aix would find 
a bride and bring her back to the old home tree. 
He was my last hope. There was no other 
wood-duck around that I knew. Indeed, his 
parents in the stub were the only pair I had 
ever known in their own home. He, now, alone 
[229] 



of his beautiful kind, was left to me j and tie 
had no mate. 

Day after day he waited for her in the swale ; 
night after night he returned. Then came a 
night when he did not return. Morning came 
and another night. 

Anxiously I pulled \i\) the lake and drew 
softly into the run. There stood the old stub. 
Had little Aix found his bride and brought her 
home'? 

I caught a bit of bush by the bank and 
waited. Then, drawing near, I tapped gently. 
No, he had not come yet. 

And that, too, was many springs ago. 

The old maple stub still leans out over the 
run ; and still, whenever I can, I push quietly 
in among the shadows and remember— for little 
Aix, if he found a mate, never brought her back 
to the old home tree. 



[230] 



CHICKAKEE 




CHICKAREE 

^^ /^l^^T, you rascal ! You arrant tliief ! " I heard 
\J some one sliout in a higli-pitched, feminine 
voice, and hurrying through the lilac hedge, I 
saw my hostess hurl an ear of corn into a pine- 
tree that overhung the smoke-house. Her face 
was burning with amazement and wrath. 

'^Think of it ! " she cried. ^'I have fed and 
petted those red squirrels, I don't know how 
long, and there goes one of them with a young 
phcBbe-bird in his mouth. Years and years 
I 've tried to lure the birds back to build in the 
yard as they used to. I had banished every cat, 
killed every snake, and bribed every boy in the 
neighborhood. They would not come for all 
[233] 



that. I could n't understand. But look at that ! 
The Judas ! " 

Thus, more and more is Chickaree's true char- 
acter being discovered. My hostess had heard 
dark stories of Chickaree, but she had scouted 
them. ^^Why, he 's a squirrel, not a monster ! " 
she had said. I had said that, too ; and I was 
unbelieving until I caught him deliberately kill- 
ing a brood of young robins. 

It is because he appears to be a squirrel that 
we are so unwilling to think him evil. What 
form in all the world, besides the dove's, is more 
suggestive of sweet innocence than the squirrel's? 
Yet here is this red-coated, red-handed little 
wretch, having the form of godliness, but all 
scarlet within. The revelation of his true in- 
wardness is a real iiain, a loss of so much faith 
in the faithful out-of-doors. This squirrel has 
been masking among us in sheep's clothing. The 
wolf ! Out with him ! Who knows what murder 
he has not done % what he is capable of, doing ? 

Where do you get your unholy and horrible 

craving. Chickaree? Is there weasel blood 

mingled with the squirrel in your veins? You 

[234] 



are depraved past belief— seven times worse 
than the weasel, for his blood-thirst is natural. 
The black -snake and turkey -buzzard are almost 
moral compared with you. You are everything 
wicked ; you have earned your evil reputation ; 
you deserve to be shot. 

Perhaps you do, though I am not just sure ; 
for it is very hard to say exactly what justice is. 
We, your judges, what virtue have we more than 
you, Chickaree! Is our blood-thirst natural? 
are we kin to the weasel? We eat birds, young 
birds sometimes ; we even eat you. 

No, Chickaree, you are no worse than the rest 
of us. You are bad enough, so bad that you 
and your tribe will have to be exterminated, I 
fear, because we righteous judges must needs 
doom somebody for all this mischief that we and 
our cats commit. I am sorry for you. I wish 
you would repent and eat only nuts and pine- 
buds, as befits an orthodox squirrel. 

I am convinced that while we may not over- 
estimate the havoc of the red squirrels among 
the birds, we greatly underestimate that of the 
cats. Keduce the number of cats ; stop shooting 
[235] 



the birds, and help them with their nesting, 
and the red squirrels, hawks, and weasels will 
only serve, as it seems they must have been in- 
tended to serve, to maintain a proper balance 
in the wild life out-of-doors. 

For, after all, we do not want to lose any 
creature from the few still left in our fields and 
woods. The passing of the red squirrel would 
be just as real a loss, and, in a way, as great a 
loss, as the extinction of the redbird. I care to 
hear him bluster in the pines. It is as foolish to 
ask which of the two I had rather lose, red 
squirrel from the woods, or redbird from the 
swale, as to ask which of my two children I had 
rather give up, the three-year-old who can 
whistle, or the one-year-old who can only jabber. 

Chickaree has a wider acquaintance among 
us humans than any other wild fellow in fur ; 
and more friends, too, despite the multiplying 
of those who know his real nature. He has 
friends because he has earned them. Who ever 
saw a chickaree, if he were given the slightest 
chance to be friendly, that was bashful, squeam- 
ish, or unsociable ? 

He spills over with loud talk and conceit, but 
[ 236 ] 



he never fails to be interesting. It is partly 
because he is so frankly interested in one's 
affairs that he is so entertaining. A gossiping 
gadabout, a busybody, a scold 5 manners of an 
English sparrow (which alone is enough to have 
him hanged), he— but what shall I say more? 
This : that, in spite of his faults, I like him and 
don't want him hanged. 

I often go into the woods when I deserve and 
enjoy a scolding. Many a day, many an acre 
hereabout, would utterly lack the sound and 
form of any wild thing were it not for Chick- 
aree. He is mostly sound, I know 5 jet he has 
agile legs, too, and quick wit and audacity. He 
has a constitution and an ability to take care 
of himself that I like to think of. See how he 
thrives. You cannot find a deep wood, a shaded 
roadside, a park, or a graveyard to which Chick- 
aree does not dispute the title. 

I once met one who claimed to own, if I 
understood him, the whole north slope of Mount 
Washington. This was really more than he 
needed, but he was a very greedy squirrel, and 
I smile now as I remember how his greed over- 
reached itself and how it brought him low. 
[237] 



The mountain did not fall upon him, only 
half a loaf of bread. But half a loaf of bread, if 
it falls just right, may hurt, as every one knows 
who has dropped even a slice of bread on his 
toes— butter side down. 

Descending the mountain by Avay of the car- 
riage-road, we stopped at a little stone bridge 
to eat our lunch, when this squirrel came forth 
and ordered us on. He immediately smelled 
the lunch, however, and grew silent, creeping 
up within arm's-reach of us, watching how we 
ate. He showed no sign of timidity, only curi- 
osity, then wonder, then deep, delighted sniff- 
ings. The smells of molasses cookies and Summit 
House rolls were new savors, new and gnawing. 
They made him hungry, so madly hungry that, 
when I turned and threw the luncli-box into 
the dry bed of the stream, he was into it almost 
as soon as it landed. 

His first bite was of bread and butter. With- 
out pausing to chew it, he seized the slice, scurried 
off down a log, and disappeared in the forest. 
''Where is he taking it^" we asked. Not far 
away, for suddenly he popped over a rock, gave 
us a quick glance, and jumped into the box again. 
[238] 



There were several cookies left iu the box, 
some slices of bread, and nearly half a loaf of 
bread uncut. 

Down the log ran Chickaree with a second 
slice, I watching from where I sat, following 
him by the gleam of the white bread, which 
showed clearly in the tangle and dark of the 
forest. It flashed, then vanished, then flashed 
again into view— flash, flash, flash — round and 
round and round up a tall spruce, till I lost it 
in the top. We were trying to catch sight of 
him returning, when he startled us by again 
landing, with a sudden leap, right in the middle 
of the box. 

This time he found the uncut loaf; and he 
also found the measure of his wit and muscle. 
Now he grew greedy. He should have been 
content with the slices. Covetousness, also, goeth 
before a fall. 

There are some of us humans who will take 
the half -loaf when we cannot get the whole ; 
but it were better for most of us if even the 
half-loaf were sliced. How much better it 
would have been for Chickaree ! 

Here was a windfall, such a windfall as comes 
[239] 



but once to a mountain squirrel, and Chickaree 
was excited. How was he to hide this big piece "^ 
YeS; hide it 5 for it was plain to us that he meant 
no other squirrel to share his luck, or even 
know about it, else why his silence, excitement, 
and hurry % 

Tilting the loaf up, he fixed his long teeth into 
the top crust, and by dint of backing and pulling 
got out of the gully, landing the loaf in time 
upon the top of a flat rock. Unable to raise his 
load clear, he came round behind it in order to 
push. It was slow, hard work. Becoming more 
and more anxious, he forgot that the rock, in 
the direction he was going, ended abruptly with 
a sheer fall of ten feet. 

On he struggled across the rough, lichened 
surftice, inch by inch, until, catching a good foot- 
hold, he gave a mighty shove and went over, 
he and his loaf together, striking with a beauti- 
ful splash in a little pool of water below. 

We took a bit of wicked pleasure in his fall, 
as we saw him scramble out unhurt. He came 
out, however, still holding to his loaf. But it 
was thoroughly soaked now,— a condition that 
was evidently new to Chickaree,— and as he 
[240] 



dragged it up the crust came oif, letting the loaf 
tumble back into the water. He ran away to 
hide the crust, then came back quickly to the 
pool. 

It was fun to see him fish for that queer piece 
of bread. He would catch it in his paws, take 
it in his mouth, scoop and pull and root, but 
each time get only crumbs. The xDrovoking 
stuff had suddenly gone soft— or bewitched. It 
would not come out. 

But Chickaree was not bewitched. He was 
angry— plain old- Adam anger. Up on the log 
he jumped, flipped his tail, clawed the bark, 
and, with a burst of passion, gave the whole 
mountain a furious upbraiding. It was the 
mountain, for he looked at nothing in particular, 
nothing smaller. He railed. After one terrible 
minute he came back to us, coughing and husky 
and sore in the throat. 

When he reached the box, how quickly his 
spirit changed ! ISTo April sky ever broke more 
suddenly into rainy sunshine than Chickaree on 
picking up one of the molasses cookies. He was 
surprised and delighted. Never had he tasted 
its like. Birch catkins and beechnuts 1 Flat ! 
16 [ 241 ] 



Simply flat in comparison. Even the tender 
terminal buds of the pine wonld be tasteless 
now. And stale acorns *? Dreadful ! 

All this we saw in his countenance as he took 
the first mouthful and bolted with the cooky. 
He bolted, but stopped short for another bite. 
Then on he went, only to halt for a third bite ; 
started again, but came to a dead stop on the end 
of the log, and finished the cooky then and there. 

I now went after him to see if I could find 
where he had hidden the bread. As I stepped 
upon the log, he turned and came down it toward 
me. I have always wished since that I had not 
flinched. 

He drew near ; walked over my foot and 
smelled of me. Cookies ! Where ■? He sniffed 
and sniffed ; then catching the odor of the hand 
hanging at my side, he stood up to get a bite, 
when the foolish hand twitched. That was 
enough. It had moved. He would not approach 
me again. 

The two slices I found, but not the crust. 
One of them was high up in the top of a spruce, 
the other in the moss behind a stump. 

Perhaps these were temporary hiding-places, 
[242] 



chosen hurriedly in his excitement, from which, 
later on, he would collect his spoil for storage in 
some secret hollow. I am not certain, however, 
that Chickaree has a barn, a winter storehouse. 
I have often found collections of pignuts in old 
tree-hollows that looked as if Chickaree had 
stored them there. Still they were always shells 
only. The whole nuts may have been carried 
into the hollows for safety and convenience, a 
few at a time, as they were to be eaten. 

Yet, more than once I have caught Chickaree 
stuffing hollow rails with corn. Perhaps he in- 
tended to keep this store against the winter. I 
suspect, for I know Chickaree, that it was more 
mischief and itching for occupation, than pro- 
vision against need. 

He never finished the stuffing. Long before 
the cavity was full the little scatterbrain would 
be off at some other active but useless task, leav- 
ing his store to be found and devoured by 
the jays or the mice. Chickaree will never re- 
member that the second rail from the bottom, 
in the section between the stump and the sas- 
safras-tree, holds a pint of golden corn. 

All wild animals are mere children. They all 
[ 248 ] 



love to put things into holes. They all must be 
busy— if with uothiug else than their tails. But 
they rarely worh. 

I knew a chickaree who lived in a little glen 
by the side of Thorn Mountain Cabin, whose 
activity took on the character of real work. But 
why in August, two months before the end of 
the harvest, he should pick green catkins from 
the birch, I don't know. You cannot store them 
when they are dead ripe, perhaps, for they may 
fall to pieces. As I watched him, however, I 
concluded he was doing the work, not seriously, 
but for fun. He must do something • and this 
tree, full of little cones, appealed to him as a box 
of buttons to a baby. 

He owned this great single bii'ch at the head 
of the glen. He lived in it alone, and warred 
against all trespassers, birds or beasts. 

I have seen him chase a junco up and down 
and across the top until the bird flew off. A 
flock of them settling among the branches drove 
him frantic. I, too, called down his wrath ; but 
after a week of daily visits he allowed me to 
stretch out upon the moss beneath the low wide 
limbs and watch him woik. 
[244] 



His morning task was to hide about a pint of 
catkins from this yellow birch in a secret crib 
among the ferns of the glen. Morning after 
morning I found him busy, sometimes arriving 
early enough to see him begin ; and I am quite 
sure he often did his stint before he took break- 
fast. 

Up and down the tree he would race, a round 
trip every three minutes, loaded with a single 
catkin each time down. After storing about 
thirty he would stop with one upon a certain 
bottom limb, and here, on the under side of the 
leaning bole, safely hidden from overhead ene- 
mies, he would begin breakfast, scattering the 
winged seeds, as he ate the catkin, down in a 
thin flaky shower upon me underneath. He 
always ate squatting close upon this same limb 
and backed up against the trunk. The ground 
below was snowed under with the scales which 
had fallen as he husked the seeds. 

Here, too, he slept, I think, during the summer 
nights. He may have had a hole among tlie 
rocks, but I am sure he had no nest in the glen. 
Having lived only part of the year with these 
mountain squirrels, I am not so well acquainted 
[245] 



with their nesting habits as I am with those of the 
squirrels in the piny woods of N^ew Jersey. The 
red squirrels are very abundant among the pines, 
and here they live in nests the year around. 

These beds are very bulky, built mostly of 
cedar bark, stripped fine and matted into an 
irregular mass the size of a hat. The doorways 
oi)en from the bottoms or sides, leaving the roofs 
without a crack and perfectly waterproof. 

Sometimes an abandoned crow's nest is taken 
for the foundation. In this a deep, soft bed of 
newly shredded bark is made, and a thatch of 
the same material laid on above. Such a nest 
will not rock and sway when the winds are high, 
as the gray squirrel's often will ; for the crows 
did not build out in the hands of the branches, 
but close up on the shoulders. What it lacks of 
that kind of thrill, however, will be more than 
made good by the comfort and security obtained 
from the thick nest-bottom of the crows. 

About my home in New England Chickaree 
is almost a ground-squirrel, rarely traveling a 
road higher than a stone wall. But in the 
Southern pines he runs the tree-tops, scam- 
pering along the dizzy roads almost as fast as 
[246] 



one can run on the ground beneath. It makes 
one pause to see him skij) along a slender limb, 
jump to a second, race out to its tip, and leap— 
clearing fifteen feet— to catch the very ends of 
another limb swaying in the air fifty feet above 
one. 

During the early summer the tender terminal 
buds of the pine (barring young birds) furnish 
Chickaree the bulk of his food. Acorns, chest- 
nuts, corn, and the pine-cone seeds he eats later 
on in the fall and winter. 

He seems particularly abundant and particu- 
larly at home among the pines. He and Scelop- 
orus, the pine-tree lizard, are joint possessors 
of the sandy barrens. And Chickaree fits his 
surroundings. The gray squirrel's color blends 
naturally with the neutral, lichen-mottled boles 
of the oak and maple woods. He is rarely 
found in the pines ; but that is partly because 
he is afraid of Chickaree and hates him as he 
hates poison. Chickaree's color is piny, shading 
perfectly with the dusky red-browns of the 
barrens. These are his rightful realm. Fortu- 
nately he does less harm here than almost sliij- 
where else, for the small birds that nest in the 
[247] 



pines are comparatively few. Here he may live, 
for we liave no cause to carry our war with him 
into the barrens. 

There is a large clump of pines beyond Cubby 
Hollow where I am always sure of a chickaree- 
scolding. The moment I get within range one 
of the little wretches will climb a tree and warn 
me to keep out. He is instantly joined by 
several others, and together they follow me over- 
head, disputing every step with me, swaggering, 
growling, and pouring forth a torrent of threat 
and abuse until wheezy and winded. 

It is bluster, most of it ; they love to make a 
noise. If I drop down at the foot of a low- 
limbed pine, they gather round, anxious for a 
look at me, close to. Once I remember that a 
chipmunk joined them, and his daring lent them 
courage. Then came an inquisitive little chick- 
adee, behind whom one of the squirrels, now 
only a bundle of curiosity, crept down within 
reach of me, flattened himself to the trunk, and 
began a running comment, a speculation as to 
my character, in little broken snorts, sniffs, 
coughs, and snickers, emphasizing it all with 
jerky gesticulations of his tail. 
[248] 



AVhat did lie say about me? Slighting things, 
I ha^e no doubt ; deriding me, perhaps, because 
I could not climb trees and bite off pine-buds. 
I don't know. But I do know this, tliat, what- 
ever he said, I enjoyed having him near me, for 
I am sure that he half enjoyed my being near 
him. And I like the pines better for his sake. 
They would often be dull and silent if he were 
gone, for the pines are not companionable trees. 
He is their spirit of lightness, gaiety, and chatter. 



[249] 



BIED FRIENDSHIPS 







BIRD FRIENDSHIPS 



I 



T is not the sight of mere numbers that inter- 
ests us as the "gathering swallows twitter 
in the skies/' but rather the gathering itself, and 
the twittering— the feeling of kinship and com- 
mon interest which we see in the flocking. 
These birds are apparently social creatures ; and 
social feelings are human. By so much are we 
and the swallow^s one. 

It shows a very pleasing quality in bird na- 
ture, this need which leads them to flock ; and 
it seems sometimes to be a deeper, more human 
feeling than mere bird-of-a-feather interest — 
something close akin to friendship. 

The autumn flocking of the swallows and the 
[253] 



blackbirds, while far from meaning friendship, 
means a great deal more indeed than polite so- 
ciability, a drawing-room gathering. 

There seem to be snch functions in birddom. 
A very select and unspotted company of crows 
in my neighborhood meet frequently throughout 
late summer and in the autumn, for no other 
reason, apiDarently, than the pleasure of one an- 
other's society. They are as decorous as they 
are select, usually, though not always. 

One day I will see them sitting about in the 
top of a great solitary white oak beyond the 
meadow and talking quietly. Gossip running 
short, they adjourn to the meadow below for an 
equally quiet feed along the little river. An- 
other day I will hear them boisterously caw- 
cawing in a very gale of good time. There is 
fun awing. Somebody is " it." Suddenly into 
the air they scatter, and up, in the tumbling, 
whirling confusion of some game, all cawing at 
the top of their lungs. I am not versed in crow 
sports, but this looks and sounds very much like 
the rough-and-tumble of a college foot-ball 
contest. On yet another day the loud cawing 
will be furious and angry. Anybody can tell 
[254] 



when a crow is augry. If I wait uow, I am 
pretty certain to see the whole elect company 
drumming a red-tailed hawk or a blundering 
barred owl out of the neighborhood. 

They are an exclusive lot, these corbies, and 
highly sociable. As far as I can make out, how- 
ever, they flock for the mere pleasure of it— 
for the noise, the push, and the gossip of a crowd. 
They are neighborly, but hardly show real 
friendship. 

It is somewhat different with the swallows 
and with many of the migrants. The same 
friendly class feelings draw the swallows together 
as draw the crows. A swallow is a swallow. But 
migrating swallows are often not all of one 
feather. I have seen barn, bank, and tree 
swallows together, and with them, in one mov- 
ing flock, king-birds, martins, swifts, and chip- 
pies. All of these, in a general way, were of the 
same mind, liking and disliking the same things. 
But, what was far more, at these migration-times 
they were all of the same purpose : all going a 
journey, a journey full of hardships and plea- 
sures, common alike to every one upon the road. 

In traveling this long unguarded highway 
[255] 



mere feather distinctions are likely to disappear. 
Mutual need and good-fellowsliip prevail. It 
is enough to be a bird, any kind of a well- 
disposed bird, going this southern journey. For 
how does one migrating bird differ from an- 
other •? He does not sing now, nor wear his 
fine feathers, nor do a hundred things that in 
the summer made him sufficient unto himself. 
He just travels, and takes what comes ; and the 
more to share it all, the merrier. A common 
purpose started the birds off, and now a common 
interest draws all of them together. They are 
not a fiock, but a company; not swallows and 
swifts merely : they are bird pilgrims, of many 
feathers, passing along the strange migration 
road to a distant land. 

Perhaps this camaraderie of the pilgrimage 
never reaches down to real friendship. But 
what about that fellow-feeling which is brought 
out by the stress of winter? This at least must 
come very near to friendship. A lean, hungry 
winter makes close comrades among the birds. 
They will all flock then. The only solitary, de- 
fiant bird I meet in the winter is the great 
northern shrike. What a froward, stiff-necked 
[256] 



sinner he is ! But liow superb ! No cheeping, 
no cowering, no huddling together for him. 
How I hate and admire him ! 

But birds that have hearts in their breasts, 
though they were as foreigners to one another 
in the summer, nesting in regions far apart, will 
flock during the long deep snows and hard 
weather. Every winter I see mixed bands of 
goldfinches, j uncos, and tree-sparrows whirling 
over the snow, the goldfinches leading— all of 
them in search of grass and seedy weed-heads. 
Nuthatches, kinglets, and chickadees will yank- 
yanJc, tee-tee, and phee-he-be by the hour together, 
apparently to their great consolation and mu- 
tual support. 

This misery-made companionship, though real 
and helpful at the time, is doubtless not quite 
self-forgetful enough to be called friendship. A 
goaded friendship must lack something of friend- 
ship's virtue. 

Of a different quality entirely seems the feel- 
ing that holds the broods of certain birds to- 
gether in a real, intimate family life. Family 
life among the birds ? We usually think of the 
nestlings as being led out by the parent birds 
17 [257] 



and fed until they learn to forage for them- 
selv^es^ then scattering, each going its separate 
way. And so most nestlings do. But there are 
exceptions. In some bird families the young 
grow U13 together, leaving neither parents nor 
home neighborhood until they mate and build 
homes of their own. Every covey of quails is 
such a family ; so, too, I think, is every flock 
of chickadees. Every wedge of wild geese is 
either a family or a small neighborhood of fami- 
lies on a journey. 

One dare not let his fancy free with the 
thought of such family life. It is too dangei'- 
ously beautiful. What intimacies, what brother- 
love and mother-love, what human home scenes, 
could one not imagine? Not Avholly imagine, 
either. More than one tender passage I have 
actually seen and heard. 

And so have hundreds of observers, doubtless. 
For who has not listened to a mother quail call- 
ing her hunted family together when the snow 
and the night were falling'? It is most sweetly, 
tenderly human— the little mother, standing 
upon the fence or in the snow of the silent 
fields, calling softly through the storm until the 
[258] 



young ones answer and, one by one, come hurry- 
ing to her out of the dusk, and murmuring. 
Some of them do not hear. They have been 
frightened far away. Louder now she whistles : 
Whir-rl-Ie, whir-r-rl-le, icMr-r-r-rl-le ! But there 
is only the faint purr of the falling snow, only 
darkness and the silent ghostly fields. 

Like little children, the covey will sometimes 
dream or be disturbed by some sound half 
heard in their sleep. I have been near when 
the mother soothed them. A covey lived down 
the bushy hillside, just beneath the house. 
Coming up from the meadow one September 
night, I passed close to their roost, and stopped 
in the moonlight just beyond. Off across the 
meadow the hounds were baying on the trail of 
a fox. They were coming fast toward me. As 
they broke into the open on the hills beyond the 
meadow, I heard a movement among the quails, 
then a low murmuring. The cry of the hounds 
was disturbing the brood ; they were uneasy 
and restless : and the mother was stilling their 
fears, murmuring something low and soft to re- 
assure them. 

They quieted at once ; and it was well. A 
[259] 



moment later, up the narrow path by the side of 
which they were sleeping trotted the fox. Upon 
seeing me he paused, and so close to them that 
their slightest stir would have been caught by 
his keen, quick ears. 

So throughout the winter and far into the 
spring they live together, an intimate, happy 
family— more intimate and happier, perhaps, 
than many human families. For see what a 
number of children there are ! It is significant, 
is it not, that only large bird families apparently 
know the joy of family life? 

Even here among the quail there may be no 
real love and friendshij), no affection, no sharing 
among the children. But there must be true 
mother-love in the breast of such a mother bird 
as this. Then why not love in the children? 

Interpret it as we please, with or without sen- 
timent, we cannot deny the existence of this 
family life among the birds. 

The need of guidance, of food and i^rotection, 
may exj)lain it in the case of the migrating 
geese ; but this is not enough for the quail and 
the chickadee families. 

[260] 



FARM-YARD STUDIES 




FARM-YAED STUDIES 



WE were tied up for the night. Dusk and 
the swamp silence had settled— settled 
with a distinctness and presence almost super- 
natural. A banjo had been twanging, but the 
breakdown was done, the shuffling feet quiet. 
The little cotton-boat had become a part of the 
moonlit silence and the river swamp. 

Two or three roustabouts were sitting atop 
the rosin-barrels near by, under the spell, appa- 
[263] 



rently, of the round autumnal moon. There was 
frost in the air and a thousand fragrant odors 
from the ripened swamp ; but not a cry nor call 
in the stillness^ until, suddenly, breaking through 
the hush with a jarring, eery echo, sounded the 
hoot of a great horned owl. 

One of the roustabouts dropped to the deck, 
holding up his hand. We listened. Again the 
weird, startling Whoo, hoo-Jioo-Jioo-whoo-you-ah- 
ah! 

"Dat de king owl," whispered the darky. 
^^He 's out for turkey. OV gobbler done gone 
hid. Listen I de king owl gwine make him 
talk." 

We listened, waiting ; but there came no an- 
swering talk, no gobble of challenge out of the 
swamj). I sat up until the moon rode high 
overhead, hoping ^^de king owl" would drive 
one of the wild swamp turkeys from its tree -top 
roost and send him fluttering and talking over 
the open river. I was to have a sight of one the 
next day,— a dead one,— but I am still waiting 
to see and hear the great bronze bird alive in 
its native haunts. 

They were all about me here on the Savannah 
[264] 



—a few of them. The next day at one of the 
hindings a colored boy brought a fine gobbler 
aboard which he had shot back in the swamp. 
In the tops of the tall cottouwoods all through 
the wilder stretches of the South and the great 
Southwest, scattering flocks of the native wild 
turkeys still roost. They are so few and wild, 
however, that the naturalist who would study 
the habits of the bird is almost compelled, nowa- 
days, to go to the barn-yard, tame and unro- 
mantic as that locality is. 

If one does not mind the setting, he will find 
the barn-yard a more convenient place of study 
and quite as good as the primeval forests 5 for 
the turkey is a maddeningly perverse, persistent 
creature, that centuries of civilizing still leave 
as unchanged in habit as in looks. AVhen wild 
turkeys in the market hang side by side with 
tame ones, only a keen-eyed naturalist can tell 
from their appearance which birds had never 
seen a barn-yard, and which had descended by a 
traceable barn-yard line from the year 1526. No 
less persistent have been the old wild habits of 
the birds. 

Like our house-cats, the turkeys wear a cloak 
[265] 



of domesticity ; but not even pussy could put 
hers off and go utterly wild more readily than 
the turkey. Not an original woods trait or 
habit seems to have been radically changed— 
hardly altered— by all our fine efforts on the 
birds at home and abroad. For the turkey has 
traveled. He is strictly an American,— Mexi- 
can, perhaps,— sailing first from Mexican shores 
about 1526, and not returning until the Pilgrims 
and early settlers came. He was brought back 
a larger bird than when he first set out, but still 
a turkey and unalterably American. 

Which does not mean that he is a good 
American, deserving the eagle's national place. 
The turkey is unalterable because he cannot 
learn anything, so nearly brainless is he. The 
father— it was the mother— of all the turkeys 
was originally endowed with two wits and as 
many crafty ways as she had toes. Since her 
day no turkey-hen has gained a third wit, nor 
learned a new way, nor forgotten one of the old 
ones. No tiir^ej -gobbler ever had or shall have 
any wit at all. 

From Spain, whence the turkey spread over 
Europe, we can trace his wanderings back to the 
[266] 



West Indies, and farther back to Mexico, wlicre 
the parent stock still survives. It is from this 
Southwestern variety, Melear/ris mrximna, and 
not from the variety in the East and North, 
that our domestic turkey has sprung. The only 
marked difference in the two varieties is that 
mexicana has creamy-white tips to his tail-feath- 
ers and to those over-lapping the base of the 
tail, while gallopavo's tips are chestnut-brown. 
The Southwestern bird, too, is somewhat greener 
than the Northern. 

Both varieties are growing Aery rare, and be- 
fore long will become extinct. Our Northern 
bird was abundant in some parts as late as 
Audubon's day. He bought them for ^' three- 
pence each." Yet he says, speaking of the 
Alleghanies : '^ While in the Great Pine Forest 
in 1829, I found a single feather that had been 
dropped from the tail of a female, but saw no 
bird of the kind." One can range half of the 
country now and not find so much as a feather. 

If they were wholly gone, if they had never 
been studied wild by the naturalists, we still 
could almost write the life-history of the bird 
from the habits of our tame turkeys. 
[267] 



The tame tnrkey-lieu is notorious for stealing 
her nest. The wild hen steals hers— not to ex- 
asperate her owner, of course, as is the common 
belief about the domestic turkey, but to get 
away from the gobbler, who, in order to prolong 
the honeymoon, will break the eggs as fast as 
they are laid. He would lay him down and 
die, almost, for female adoration. He has just 
enough brains to be sentimental, jealous, and 
boundlessly fond of himself. His wives, too, 
are fools enough to worship him, until— there 
comes an egg. That event makes them wise. 
They understand this strutting coxcomb, and 
quietly turning their backs on him, leave him 
to parade to his precious self alone. 

There are crows, also, and buzzards from whom 
the hen must hide the eggs. Nor dare she for- 
get her own danger while sitting, for there are 
foxes, owls, and prowling lynxes ready enough 
to i:)ounce ui3on her. On the farm most of these 
enemies have taken human form. 

For a nest the wild hen, like her sister in the 
pasture-woods, scratches a slight depression in 
the ground, usually under a thick bush, some- 
times in a hollow log, and lays from twelve to 
[268] 



twenty eggs, which are somewhat smaller and 
more elongated than the tame tnrkey's, but of 
the same color : dull cream, sprinkled with red- 
dish dots. 

More than one hunt for the stolen turkey nest 
has been futile because the cautious mother cov- 
ered the eggs carefully when leaving them. 
This is one of the wild habits that have persisted. 
The wild hen, as the hatching approaches, will 
not trust even this precaution, but remains with- 
out food and drink upon the nest until the 
chicks can be led off. She can scarcely be 
driven from it, often allowing herself to be cap- 
tured first. 

Mother-love burns fierce in her. Such help- 
less things are her chicks ! She hears them 
peeping in the shell and breaks it to help them 
out. She preens and dries them and keeps them 
close under her for days. 

Not for a week after hatching does she allow 
them out in a rain. After that, against the cold 
of a wetting, the wild mother, it is said, will feed 
the buds of the spice -bush to her brood, as our 
grandmothers used to administer mint tea. 

The tame hen seems to have lost much of this 
[269] 



native motlier skilly doubtless because for many 
generations she has been relieved of the larger 
part of the responsibility. I uever knew one to 
doctor her infants for vermin. But the wild 
hen will. The woods are full of ticks and de- 
testable vermin as deadly as cold rains. When 
her brood begins to lag and pine, the mother 
knows, and leading them to some old ant-hill, 
she gives them a sousing dust-bath. The vermin 
hate the odor of the ant-scented dust, and after 
a series of washings disappear. 

This is wise 5 but if report be true, then the 
wild turkey is as wise and far-seeing a mothei' as 
the woods contain. One observer tells of three 
hens that stole off together and fixed up a nest 
between themselves. Each put in her eggs— 
forty-two in all— and each took turns guarding, 
so that the nest was never left alone. 

What special enemy caused this unique part- 
nership the naturalist does not say. The three 
mothers built together, brooded together, and 
together guarded the nest. But how did those 
three mothers divide the babies? 

Every one who has had the least to do with 
turkeys knows their timidity and indecision. 
[270] 



How often, as a boy, I have watched tliem going 
to roost in the apple-trees and counted the times 
they have stretched their necks and bobbed, 
preparatory to an upward move ! I don't re- 
member the best record for false moves, but so 
distinct is the impression of the hesitancy and 
timid bobbing that I never see a live turkey 
without saying mentally : 

One for the money, two for the show, 

Three to get ready, and four to— get ready again. 

These traits lead the wild birds to very absurd 
actions in the course of their autumn wan- 
derings. 

Late in October the turkeys of each neighbor- 
hood get together in flocks of from ten to a 
hundred aud travel on foot through the rich 
bottom-lauds in search of food. In these jour- 
neys the males go ahead, apart from the females, 
and lead the way. The hens, each conducting 
her family in a more or less separate group, 
come straggling leisurely along in the rear. As 
they advance, they meet other flocks, thus swell- 
ing their numbers. 

After a time they are sure to come to a river 
[271] 



— a dreadful thing, for, like the river of the 
song, it is one to cross. Up and down the banks 
stalk the gobblers, stretching their necks out 
over the water and making believe to start, as 
they do when going to roost in the apple-trees. 

All day long, all the next day, all the third 
day, if the river is wide, they strut and cluck 
along the shore, getting up their courage. Tlie 
ridiculous creatures have wings ; they can fly ; 
but they are afraid ! By this time, however, 
the whole flock has mounted the tallest trees 
along the bank. One of the gobblers has come 
forward as leader in the emergency. Suddenly, 
from his perch, he utters a single chick,— the 
signal for the start, — and every turkey sails into 
the air. There is a great flapping— and the 
terrible river is crossed. 

A few weak members fall on the way over, 
but not to drown. Diawiug the wings close in 
against their sides, and spreading their round 
fan-like tails to the breeze, they strike out as if 
born to swim, and come quickly to laud. 

The hens tag along at the beginning of the 
migration in order to keep their young out of 
the way of the old ill-natured gobblers who will 
[272] 



kill them. Toward the end of the wandering, in 
late November, the young are heavy enough to 
fight for themselves ; and finally, at the finding 
of a particularly rich mast of nuts oi' winter 
grapes, the flocks mingle indiscriminately, and 
remain united until the spring. 



II 



At the tail-end of the line of farm-yard inhabi- 
tants, far below the pig in interest and intelli- 
gence, stands the gobbler. Of all our birds there 
is in him tlie least to be commended. Roasting 
alone redeems him. Strangely enough, asso- 
ciated with him in the yard, served with him at 
the same Thanksgiving table, is the bird at the 
head of the line. I doubt if there is bird or 
beast, wild or tame, that for real interest and 
admirable nature approaches the gander. 

Certainly no other bird voice comes to us 
with a clearer call, no other flight so quickens 
us, no other life among birds reads so like an 
epic as the wild gander's, this voyageur of the 
clouds, this ranger of the zones. 

Farm-yard life for the goose is an entirely dif- 
18 [273] 



ferent thing from the wild^ free life of his free 
wild relatives. lu this he differs from the tur- 
key—because he has more sense^ and hence is 
more adaptable ; and because his farm-yard life 
reaches farther back into the far-away past. He 
has had more time to forget and to learn. Mor- 
ally he has resisted the degenerating influences 
of his human associations most marvelously. He 
has not the wings of former days 5 but this is 
not his fault. 'Even a goose, by taking thought, 
cannot turn pounds of his over-fed body into 
inches of wing. 

The wild Canada geese, whose honking, as 
they pass, still stirs vague longings in their fat 
brothers of the farm-yard, and sets them honk- 
ing in reply, will doubtless long outlast the 
dwindling flocks of wild turkeys. Along with 
the extreme dangers of migration^ there seem to 
go superior gifts of brain and wing and body 
which more than compensate. The turkey 
wanders a little on foot, but he is a serf, quite 
fast to the soil. The goose is a migrant and 
hence is free. 

In February the Canada geese are scattered 
along the margins of our Southern waters, al- 
[274] 



ready preparing for their flight northward to 
Canada, Labrador^ and Alaska. Early spring 
finds them back in their breeding-haunts with 
nests well under way. Then, by September, the 
long return flight begins, the flocks passing over 
the Middle States for a month or more, but all 
reaching the warm shores of the South before 
our Northern waters are closed. 

This journey in the spring is a honeymoon 
trip ; in the fall, a family excursion. The wild 
geese (this cannot be said of tame ones) are 
ideally wedded. Nothing of the gobbler's polyg- 
amy, jealousy, and viciousuess is shown by the 
gander 5 the goose does not steal away from him 
to make her nest. She and he are ^'engaged" 
before the spring migration begins. They sail 
away in company with like lovers to wed and 
go off together as soon as the flock reaches the 
Northern nesting-meadows. 

Housekeeping for the geese is a particularly 
serious business. The gander assumes his full 
share of the trouble. He never shirks nor leaves 
his mate. Day and night he stands on duty, 
guarding the mother and the nest— with his life 
if need be— against all enemies. He even helps 
[275] 



hatch the eggs, which is the limit of faithful- 
ness. 

The nest is a collection of driftweecl and 
sticks lined with down, and placed, usually, on 
the ground in a marsh or meadow. Occasion- 
allj^ it is upon a stump, or even up in some old 
fish-hawk's nest on the top of a tree. 

As soon as the goslings hatch they take to the 
water, and life for goose and gander tangles fast 
with trouble. 

I once watched a pair, that had bred in cap- 
tivity, as they were led about by one small gos- 
ling — their onlj^ one left out of a brood of seven. 
I cannot imagine their j)ulling through alive 
had all seven lived. From sunrise to nightfall 
their anxious day was spent trying to keep up 
with Master Gosling. He went whither he would ; 
they in single file waddled along behind, caution- 
ing, chiding, lamenting, so uncomfortably hur- 
ried as to have time only to snatch a blade of 
grass here, a billful of water there, as the irre- 
pressible infant straddled up and down his back- 
yard world. 

It is well along in August before the young 
are able to fly. All this time the parents have 
[276] 



cared for tlienij and will continue to keep tliem 
together as a family until the next spring, 

No phase of the life of these great birds is so 
pleasing as the thought of this family life — 
gander, goose, and goslings a united family even 
while mingling as part of some numerous flock. 
Ea ery wedge of wild geese that flies trumpeting 
overhead in the autumn nights is either a family 
or a neighborhood of families led by some strong- 
old gander. 

The great event in the goose calendar is this 
autumn flight. The life of all the rest of the 
year seems incidental to this. Need for food and 
escape from the deadly cold were doubtless the 
first causes of the migration, but they are sec- 
ondary now. The flight for its own sake seems 
to have become a fever in their bones. For 
weeks previous to the departure, restlessness and 
strange desires possess the birds. The flight— 
mile-high, for a thousand miles ; ordered, thrill- 
ing ; past changing belts of landscape to a new 
world ! — such a flight is the fulfilment of life. 

The love of it is far more than the desire for 
food. Next to the want of mate and offspring 
is the need for this flight. It is not a desire of 
[277] 



tlie flesli, but of the spirit. Food does not fail 
in tlie farm -yard ; yet the tame Canada geese, 
when the nights grow erisp and the wikl liocks 
go honking over^ will scream and rnn and flap 
their crippled wings with a wild longing to fly 
away— high and far and long into the air. 

It is little that most of ns know of the wild 
geese besides this passing. Bnt who has not seen 
the wonderfnl wedge, like a harrow moving 
across the sky, or the long file, like a strange 
many-oared shell, swimming the clonds? AVho 
has not heard the thrilling trnmpet-call out 
of the star-depths of the silent antnmn night? 
Even in the heart of a vast city I have awakened 
at the cloud-echoed cry, far off, weird, and 
haunting. 

High and swift as they move, the passage still 
is a long and dangerous one. 

Vainly the fowler's eye 
Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong, 
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky, 

Thy figure floats along. 

True ; but that height cannot always be sus- 
tained. The bird is flesh : such speed, though 
[278] 



the stroke be timed, rapidly exhausts 5 tlie wings 
must rest ; the tiier must have food ; and await- 
ing the descent is a line of enemies as long and 
almost as continuous as the course. 

Fogs obscure the w^ay j storms hinder, noises 
confuse 5 and often, most dangerous of all, across 
the brittle, bracing air of the course blows a 
thick, w^arm wind that sends the whole flock 
reeling and sagging to the earth. Hundreds of 
geese one day, overcome by a sudden wave of 
heat, dropped upon a small pond back of my 
home, and when the village turned out to the 
slaughter, the poor things scattered about the 
neighboring fields, too wxak and heavy to rise 
higher than the tree-tops. 

There is not a single event in all the year of 
the fields that I would not sooner forgo than the 
sight and sound of the flying geese. How it 
takes hold of the imagination ! There is no 
vivider passage in all of Audubou than his de- 
scription of the flight : 

^^ As each successive night the hoar-frosts cover 
the country, and the streams are closed over by 
the ice, the family joins that in their neighbor- 
hood, which is also joined by others. At length 
[279] 



they espy the ad,vauce of a snow-storm, when 
the ganders with one accord sound the order for 
their departure. 

''After many wide circlings, the flock has risen 
high in the thin air, and an liour or more is 
spent in teaching the young the order in which 
they are to move. But now the host has been 
marshaled, and oif it starts. The old males 
advance in front, the females follow, the young 
come in succession according to their strength, 
the weakest forming the rear. Should one feel 
fatigued, his position is changed in the ranks, 
and he assumes a place in the wake of another, 
who cleaves the air before him ; perhaps the 
parent bird flies for a while by his side to 
encourage him." 

What meaning, and yet what mystery, that line 
of winging geese has for us when we remember 
all this ! The bare facts brought by the natu- 
ralist are wonderful enough. But, besides the 
naturalist, the poet also has watched that strange 
winging wedge across the sky, and the facts are 
forgotten in the deeper meaning, the deeper 
mystery of his suggestions. Not the flight of the 
birds themselves seems to me so perfect, so won- 
[280] 



derful^ as the llight of these lines which a pass- 
ing waterfowl inspired : 

There is a Power whose care 
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast — 
The desert and illimitable air — 

Lone wandering, but not lost. 

He who, from zone to zone. 
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain 

flight, 
In the long way that I must tread alone, 

Will lead my steps aright. 



[281] 



ifian ou i9Vt 



^ ■> V 




